Miss. Lienau's Classroom Blog!

This week Ryley was our star. His family just returned from Florida visiting Disney World and so he had a lot of great stories and pictures to share with us. Awesome job, Ryley!

Hi, my name is Ryley and I am here to tell you stuff about my personality. First, I like to play Temple Runs and Subway Surfers Tokyo. Also, I like to play a board game called Beat the Parrots. My favourite book is “Return of the Vampires.” My favourite animal is a snake and my favourite place is Disney World. I have blue eyes and blonde hair. Now you know a lot of stuff about me.
By: Ryley

Hi again,

I hope that everyone enjoyed their long weekend! I had a wonderful time with family and friends and certainly took advantage of the weather by getting outside and playing some golf!

Now that we have had our last little break until the end of the year we are back at the daily grind. We had a lot of fun at our fieldtrip to WEM on Friday, and would like to thank the parents who joined us.

In science we have been making some awesome observations about our new caterpillars that have taken up a piece of our desk as their home. There has been lots of growth, shedding of skin, and of course the hot topic, the pooping. The caterpillars are going to start to pupate soon and we are really excited to watch them move into the next phase of their life cycle. I am also attaching a picture of all the students with their projects from the last unit.

It is that dreaded time again, math test time. We will be having our math test tomorrow for the unit of Geometry. The test will focus on naming objects, understanding the difference between prism and pyramid, sorting objects based on a given set of rules, and identifying edges, faces, and vertices. Please watch for a few things to be coming home in the next few days. We will be starting our next, and final unit, Patterning later in the week.

- Unit rubric

- Math test

- Patterning Extra Practice booklet

Social is going really well here in grade three where I feel we are building strong global citizens. We are continuing with the great pencil challenge, where we did our most recent check in today. There were a few who had lost their pencils, but still no where near the amount that we had seen previously. We are also still learning about the different geographical regions and how they affect quality of life of the people that live there. We are looking at the food, climate, basic needs, and how they are met in the different regions.

Finally, in Language arts we have been practicing our reading strategies that we have learned throughout the year so that we can use them on our Reading PAT. The strategies are excellent at helping the students comprehend the books they read, and can easily be practiced at home. Discuss the following strategies with your children and make them explain them to you so they are getting reinforcement at home. Visualization, schema, making connections, making inferences, and asking questions are all strategies that we use, sometimes subliminally, that help us greatly understand what we read.

Until next time!

Jill

Below is a copy of the letter that you received from Mrs. Kenwell regarding recorders. Thank you to those of you that have already sent in the money to purchase a recorder. The Grade 3′s are very excited to begin learning to play!

Recorder letter grade 3

Here are the spelling words for next week:
New words:
maybe
point
read
turn
ways

Review words:
January
angry
February
world
words

Tricky words:
geometry
hexagon
polygon
cylinder

It has been great to finally get some nice weather and be able to be outside after school. Hopefully this upcoming long weekend will be beautiful as well. I am hoping to get out golfing and spend some time at my families lake cabins.

Language Arts:
This morning, students in Grade 3 all over Alberta wrote the Provincial Achievement Test for Writing. They had 100 minutes to complete a story based on a picture prompt. I am looking forward to reading all the fabulous stories! This now brings our story writing unit to a wrap. We will be spending our Language Arts time now focusing on preparing for the Reading portion of the PAT’s. Please stay tuned to the blog for more information on what that test entails.

Math:
We are nearing the end of our very short Geometry Unit. Students will write their unit test on Wednesday, May 22nd. This week we have been looking at the differences between prisms and pyramids. We have been exploring all sorts of 3D shapes and have learned how we name them (according to the shape of their base). Yesterday students learned some important vocabulary… faces, vertices, edges. Today we will continue practicing how to classify these objects according to those three terms.

Science:
This week, we will have a fabulous day learning science, science and more science on Friday! We will be spending the day at West Edmonton Mall’s Marine Life Education Center where students will:
- Tour the Sea Life Caverns (and even touch Stingrays!)
- Enjoy a Penguin Presentation
- Take a Behind the Scenes Tour and get to feed turtles
- Watch the Sea Lion Training Session
- Learn about animal classification
- Watch a frog presentation

This is by far my favourite field trip and I hope the kids will enjoy it as much as I do!

Social:
We are pleased to report that only 1 student out of 42 lost their pencil this week! Not only did we not pick up any pencils, we noticed a huge decrease in the amount of other supplies laying around since we started The Great Pencil Challenge. Yesterday at the pencil check in it was great to hear “the reason we didn’t leave our pencils laying around is because we knew we didn’t have more. We needed to take care of what little amount of pencils we have.” How true…!

Enjoy the rest of your week and have a fun long weekend!

Last week Kaelyn was our star. She gave an awesome presentation and shared her love of horses (real and Schleich!) Below is her blog post about herself, as well she would like to share a blog post she wrote with her friends Jamie in Grade 4 and Ashlyn in Grade 5 for Parkland School Divisions 184 Blog.

Hi, my name is Kaelyn and I am nine years old in Grade 3. I love the outdoors and being with nature, especially horses. Green, blue, and purple are my favourite colors and my favourite places are Laos, Costa Rica, Hawaii and Belize. Horses are amazing animals and I love paints, pintos, appaloosa, kanstrup, and quarter horses.
By: Kaelyn

184 Project Blog
This year we have been involved in a project called Give a Shirt. This project started two years ago when Kaelyn’s family was traveling to Laos. Her mom showed her a video of an orphanage in Luang Prabang and this is what gave her the idea to collect clothing from the kids at Graminia School. They took 6 hockey bags full of clothing donations and handed them out to the Deak Kum Pa orphanage in Luang Prabang, Laos.

Jamie, Ashlyn and and Kaelyn have all been friends for a long time. Kaelyn’s family talked a lot about their experience in Laos. Jamie and Ashlyn’s families learned a lot about it and wanted to get involved. “I wanted to experience how other people live in different communities. I wanted to help the kids.” Ashlyn explains. “I wanted to have a new experience and help kids to make a difference,” Jamie says. So this year, Give a Shirt grew! We packed a twenty foot SeaCan full of clothing, blankets and shoes from many schools in Parkland School Division as well as schools around Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Over Spring Break, a group of fourteen people went to Laos and visited three orphanages and a village.

We learned a lot by visiting Laos. We learned how much we have and also how much we take for granted. We need to think more about how we can help the kids. Now when we want more of something or we want something bigger we always think again and think of the kids in Laos who have nothing. Before we used to think about what was happening at school and at home only, and now we think about what is going on around the world. When we were handing out the clothes, we were happy and sad at the same time. We were happy because we knew we were helping them and we could see how grateful they are even though they have so little. With us here in Canada we never seem to be happy and grateful even though we have so much stuff. We were sad because the conditions they live in are terrible and people shouldn’t have to live like that. Now that we have come back, we think twice about whether we really need something or if we just ‘want’ it.

When we were at the Num Buk orphanage we saw a dark, gloomy dorm with no electricity, the roof was caving in, and it was extremely hot. If it rains the kids get wet because there are huge holes in the roof. There are about 90 kids that live in one small dorm. They sleep on a piece of plywood and they are crammed in together and if they are very lucky they might have a blanket. We decided we need to rebuild this dorm for the kids in the orphanage. To raise money to make this happen, we are hada fundraiser at Woodbend Hall on May 11th. It was a dinner, dance with a DJ, a silent auction and we had many items for sale. We really hope that we can raise enough money for these kids because they desperately need it.
By: Kaelyn, Jamie and Ashlyn

As I am sure you have heard by now, yesterday we had a special visitor! Mr. Neumeier (Brooke in 3B’s Dad) who is part of the Edmonton Police Service SWAT team came in to show our students some of the equipment that he uses in his job. It was really awesome to see and hear about how his tools help him do his job. Here are some pictures from the morning.

Next week is spelling review week. As we have our field trip to WEM Marine Life Center on Friday, the test will be on THURSDAY, MAY 16th.
20 words will be chosen.

Regular words:
care
square
does
done
enough
ground
hour
sound
town
young
been
between
though
thought
several
alone
book
circle
group
sentence

Tricky Words:
inspired
catastrophe
truss
triangle
division
design
multiplication
building
eventually
development
organization
expected

Well we had quite the scorcher yesterday and had a little preview of what June will surely bring… a bunch of hot, sweaty kids packed in a classroom… so we escaped for DPA outside at the end of the day!

We are only a week away from our first PAT, the writing portion of the Language Arts. We have been preparing for this all year with different styles of writing, lessons on sentences, paragraphs, detail, and editing. Our focus lately has been on story writing and the components that we need to see in a story. We have also had lessons on dialogue and how to use it effectively to help our readers understand more about who our characters are. The field test that was administered last week went really well and gave the students an idea of what to expect. From the stories that I was able to read before he left the school, we are doing really well.

There have been a lot of fun with elastics and geo boards happening in math. We are learning about different polygons, what they actually are, and how to name them. The students have been creating their own in all sorts of creative ways and then sharing with partners to see if they can decipher which polygon it is. We will be working with sorting polygons next.

One of my favorite units in science is underway and we started off with a little research on different types of animals. We looked at mammals, insects, amphibians, molluscs, spiders, fish, and birds. We learned about the differences between invertebrates, and vertebrates and what an exoskeleton vs endoskelton means. We will continue to look at the different types of animals and how we differentiate between them. Our butterflies should be arriving this week which will be really exciting!

In social we have been looking at the different geographical regions in the four countries that we are studying. We are trying to get the students to understand that different regions affect how people live, for example how people in the desert live is different than people on the coast. We will be diving into the different regions in lots of detail looking at how they use the land, how they adapt to the environments, and how they protect the environment.

We have also started a fun little project to continue on with our global citizenship unit, something very close to mine and Mr.W’s hearts. We feel this is the most important unit of the year and love to come up with new ideas to keep it going throughout the year. Knowing that we bought school supplies for the kids in Laos and that we were planning on doing something along those lines for a few months now, we started collecting pencils off the ground at the end of the day. Our purpose in doing this was to show the students just how much we take for granted and that when you have a lot it is easy to be wasteful. It was awesome to hear the kids tell us their reasons for leaving their belongings laying around (we have more, we can just go get a new one etc.) and demonstrate an understanding of the overabundance we have. Over the two months of collecting the picture below shows exactly how many pencils, markers, erasers, and glue sticks were just left on the ground (after me reminding them to put everything away at the end of each day). What we have decided to do is have “The Great Pencil Challenge”. We took away all the pencils that they had in their desks (some had over 30 pencils of various lengths) and gave them each one brand new pencil with a sticker on it. They put their names on the pencil as well. The challenge is to see who can go the longest without losing their pencil or leaving it on the ground. If they do lose it they come to us and we cross their name off the list for the week, and take a new pencil. It will be interesting to see what happens now that they are aware of exactly how much goes to waste. Stay tuned for updates!!!

Just a reminder next week is a short week with May 10th being a PD day. The spelling words for next week are:

New Words:
angry
January
February
world
words

Review Words:
alone
book
circle
group
sentence

Tricky Words:
catastrophe
inspired