Welcome to our Class Blog. We share our learning goals and the great things we discover. We connect with other classrooms and collaborate on shared projects. We hope you enjoy our learning journey!
Dear Parents, This week students will begin to write the EQAO assessment beginning on Tuesday morning. All Grade 3 students will be writing beginning promptly at 9:10am. Students will be writing Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday will be a make-up time for those students who have to finish up part of their work. Students should be eating a nutritious breakfast each morning prior to writing. A reminder that our breakfast program opens at 8:55 and ALL students are welcomed to grab a bite to eat OR pick up a snack for later. We strongly encourage all students to come to school EACH day and arrive on time and ready to write. We also encourage students to wear light clothing to school as our room can get quite warm during this hot weather. A water bottle is also recommended for students to drink while writing. A note was sent home last week about an incentive in place for students who arrive to school each day and ready to write. Mme. Paradis will be giving each student a Dairy Queen sundae for those students who come each day ready to write!! Students can continue to review their EQAO folder sent home a few weeks ago. Reading, Writing and Math portions of the test will be written this week. The EQAO folder can help students familiarize themselves with the structure of the assessment and review important information or vocabulary words that will likely appear on their assessment this week.
In Math we are currently working on Probability. We are focusing on games that are fair vs. unfair. We are problem solving how to make a game more fair by using key math terms. We are also working to predict what might happen if a game is unfair or fair. The math language that we are working on is displayed in the chart. We are working on each word as our word wall words for this week. We made a chart to show how the chances can go from Impossible to Certain in a particular game. Talk to your child about what makes a game fair or unfair.
The math terms will help them for the games that we will play this week. Students are designing their own spinners for a game and they will be challenged to explain the outcome of the game by referencing the key terms.
Last Thursday our school celebrated our annual Multicultural Open House. We opened our school doors and welcomed all students and their families to visit our classrooms, watch student performances, eat a huge and generous potluck and participate in a technology event.
Before heading to the gym, students in our classroom led student conferences in our room. We worked hard on Persuasive Open House Letters to convince our parents to come to open house. It was a success as most of the students in our room made their way into our classroom to show their parents all of the great learning that takes place in Grade 3. To prepare for the evening, we talked about what we would most likely want our parents to see or learn about. We created centers and students put what they wanted to showcase at each of the centers. The centers were: Math Center, Literacy Center, Reading Center, EQAO, Padlet & QR Codes, KidBlog Writing and of course..Tech Experts!
It was so great to see the students welcome their parents into our classroom while leading them around the room to share their learning. They loved showing off their technology expertise on a variety of apps. It was the favourite center for sure. They showed their parents all of the tools we are fortunate to have. They helped them log into Chromebooks and use the iPads to log into Raz Kids. They showcased their amazing KidBlog accounts and how much our writing has improved since the start of the year. It was so nice to see parents and future generation kids excited and engaged in the learning in our Grade 3 class. Well done friends!
The technology event in our school's gym was a first for our school. Together with the leadership of some grade 5 and grade 3 students, families were treated to an engaging Padlet selfie wall. Students set up a Padlet selfie station filled with many fun props, a camera, and a projection screen to track all of the fun images that were captured. Students guided parents to navigate on the Padlet and taught them how to use the tool by getting them to post a comment about our school. Families and students were also introduced to our school Twitter account (@Assumption_ocsb). Students answered questions about how we use Twitter in our classrooms and everyone was invited to post a hard or real tweet on Assumption's Twitter account.
With all of the wonderful access to technology that our school is fortunate to have, parents got to see some of the amazing ways we can use tech tools to engage, communicate, connect and share. Our grade 3 and 5 students are comfortable navigating the tools and families were treated to a fun and engaging activity that we called our Selfie Wall. Families lined up to take selfies with their children and were excited to see their images posted on one large Padlet. We heard so much positive feedback from families who were delighted their their children had access to so many tools AND that they were using the tech tools in fun and engaging ways. It was great to have families participate and to see some of the great messages they left on our Twitter and Padlet wall. One of my favourite quotes came from a student who said "I like that we can learn at school and then go home and teach our parents too."
Below is a link to the completed Padlet selfies and some Twitter comments posted by our family community. We hope that your picture made it onto the Padlet wall. We also hope that you enjoyed participating in the event as much as we loved planning it! A huge thank you to Mme. Paradis, Mrs. McEvoy and Mme. Oliver who supported us and helped to make this event possible. Mr. MacKenzie and I were very proud of the grade 3 and 5 students who hosted a wonderful first parent technology event at Assumption. Well done everyone...until next time :-)
Our current writing unit focuses on Persuasive Writing. We completed persuasive letters to the Once-ler in The Lorax last week. This time we brainstormed and worked to persuade our PARENTS why it is important that they come to our Open House taking place this Thursday May 7th from 4:30-7:00.
Welcome to Catholic Education Week! This week we have many exciting events planned. To kick off the day, we celebrated by hosting a Literacy Day. Every class in the school read the story The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spiers. The story is an inspiring tale of a young girl who perseveres to overcome a big problem. Along the way we watch as she struggles. Her best friend inspires her to have a growth mindset.
We used this story in our class to talk about what we can say to ourselves to show what grit truly means. We made a list and came up with positive things we can say or think instead of being negative. The students shared this video today during a school wide assembly. They are truly demonstrating that they have a growth mindset. Below is a video we made using the app YouTube Capture. We hope this video inspires you to show GRIT...and offer you some real strategies to persevere!
This is the read aloud we read today using Stop Motion on YouTube. Enjoy!
