15 | December | 2022 | Mrs. Hackett's Class

While we read a print copy of this story, you can listen to the story here:

The students enjoyed thinking about history as we read this book, based on a true story. The students worked to identify the problem and solution. They also worked on inferencing skills throughout the reading.

Then, we read the following mentor sentence and examined it for verbs, nouns, adjectives. We also pointed out the temporal words. Students also noticed commas.

“Every year Captain Santa would load up his little schooner, Rouse Simmons, with thousands of beautiful Christmas trees from our northern Michigan forests.”

Today students were invited to imitate the sentence on sticky notes. Here are some examples:

This task was presented for the first time to our grade 3’s. Students wrote their problems on white boards and then recorded solutions and answer sentences on small paper to place under the boards. Then, they had the opportunity to visit each other’s boards and solve the problems. They then self-checked the answers. There was a lot of dialogue going on reading, explaining, and debating!

Students came up with problems that required a variety of skills: adding, subtracting, dividing.

Our follow-up discussion revealed a need to practise understanding problems, asking ourselves, “What is is happening? What is the action?’ We also learned that we have to identify distracting information!