Some updates tonight:
Math test: haven't finished marking, but the results were not as great as I'd hoped. As such, I'm not sure it's worth sending home because the class obviously needs more instruction/practice on patterning. Since we are already starting on numeracy, I will be "injecting" some instruction on patterning once every few days so that we can also continue working on that strand of math. As such, another assessment on patterning will likely occur before report cards come out in early December.
Meeting with our math coordinator next week to start planning our parent night. Stay tuned for more information! In the meantime, be on the lookout for some Math games to come home. Especially with numeracy, games will help reinforce the concepts we are working on (and hopefully help some students focus on the fun in Math!).
Last thing about Math: shared with the kids that Math is about laziness. We were working on representing numbers in a variety of ways today and got to talking about how identifying numbers by grouping them is much easier than counting one by one (example: 5 unit (or ones) cubes could be identified by seeing a group of 4 and 1 more rather than counting by 1's). The kids think it's absolutely hilarious!
Socials: next Tuesday, the class will have a Map quiz. The focus for the grade 3's will be on the provinces and territories of Canada (won't be particularly picky about spelling, but later, there will be another quiz on capitals, and I will start to get a little more particular!). The grade 4's will be quizzed on all continents, oceans and hemispheres. We had a discussion about it today and have identified it through colour coding on the world map. The maps should come home tomorrow when they complete their work on them.
Remembrance Day - our class will be performing two poems. Hopefully they've been shared with you by now. I've told the children that we will be reciting them by memory. We worked quite a bit on reading chorally and observing punctuation as we read. We started to look at intonation and expression and have also talked about enunciation (particularly with the words humanity, vanity and embrace). We had a good discussion about the meaning of the two poems as well.
HACE (Health and Career Education) - We've continued to work on 2nd Step. As you know from the homework from last week, we've been talking about being assertive (and also talked about passiveness and aggressiveness). We're currently working on developing empathy by trying to understand similarities and differences between people.
Reading - finally started guided reading! I've met with our first four groups this week. The students are getting into the routines and expectations for guided reading and understanding that we meet as a group to discuss the book (predictions, connecting, prior knowledge, text features, vocabulary, etc.) and that is followed by individual "whisper reading" while each person meets (and reads) to me individually. Other than guided reading, we've also started to "check for understanding" by identifying main characters, setting and 3 key events (in sequence). As the students become more comfortable with this, we will start to add different components to our checks.
Writing - finished our Halloween writing!! The artwork they completed really complements the write ups about Haunted Houses or Potions for sale. Some fantastic ideas and words were used! Through this writing activity, I introduced the writing process (aka Writer's Workshop):
1. Brainstorming - ideas, words
2. Drafting
3. Editing - checking for spelling, conventions
4. Conference - they share their writing with me and we talk about what they did well and followed by 1-3 things they need to do to "revise" (improve) their writing
5. Revising
6. Re-conference or Final copy.
Through the individual conferences, I can learn a lot about what students need to work on. Next week, we will be starting an activity on "hooks" (we talked a bit about introductions and conclusions in this past activity as well). The activities/assignments I give will be geared towards a certain write trait (see the class handbook for more info) or a writing feature. The conferences help me and the students narrow in on the individual skills that they need to work on as students are at a variety of comfort/skill levels in writing.
I put out a request for any clean and dry pumpkin seeds that may be left over from Halloween. We are planning a Christmas (yes! I am really not ready to think about it, but it's got to be done!!) craft and it's the perfect time of year to get pumpkin seeds!! If you've got any, we'd be ever so happy to have them sent our way.
Hope everyone had a great Halloween and that your coming weekend is a restful one!!
