Curriculum/Class Updates from 3B!

I thought I would write a blog post about the many things happening in our classroom.  We are in full swing with several projects!

Social Studies
Firstly, in our indigenous peoples unit we have been learning about a few indigenous peoples around the world.  The unit starts quite globally by looking at similarities and differences among different cultures and groups of people.  We get more focused on the four regions of the United States after the Christmas holiday and look at these four regions in terms of culture and traditions.  The unit culminates in a Grade Three Pow Wow/Cultural Celebration.  This year we are holding this on Friday February 6th.  More info will come as to how to prepare the children.  In class they are in their four regional groups and have chosen indigenous names.  They have jobs in their groups and are learning about the key elements of food, shelter, clothing and culture within their tribes.  They are learning how to make wampum waist bands, head bands, necklaces and weaving.  We learn about how many of these things were important in these tribes and then learn how to make them.  They will wear this at the pow wow.

Another component to the indigenous unit is the creating ebooks that the students are beginning to learn about.  They will be working with Ms. Roach's class in small groups to write their own ebooks about their tribal region.  We are using the book creator app and Google Presentation for the final product ----stay tuned!

Math
We are finishing up our work with multiplication this coming Friday but this will be a part of our learning in division when we start that unit next Monday.  At this point we have covered most of the facts and have learned, most importantly, what they mean and how we can use strategies to solve many problems using the basic facts.  We had a chapter 8 test on Thursday last week and the overall scores were really overwhelming great.  
Yes, memorization does play a small role in helping to learn the facts but it is our goal that the children learn what they mean not just how to dig up the memorized answers.  Some great websites to help your child master the facts are:

MULTIPLICATION:
GREG TANG MATH WEBSITE
MULTIPLICATION TABLE GAME/PUZZLE
UNITED NATIONS MULTIPLICATION
LOTS OF TIMES TABLE GAMES!
SKIP COUNTING GAME
PING PONG PANDA
SHIFTING TIMETABLES TASK

These can also be found under the "Links to Learning Sites" tab.

Language Arts
In writing, we are more than mid-way through our unit on Opinion and Persuasion. The children are learning the art of crafting opinion essays, petitions and editorials.  We will be culminating this in early-mid February with a writing celebration.  

Our reading program takes a similar approach to writing workshop in that the children learn strategies and skills in hopes of them applying them to their own reading.  They move through centres where they work with small groups of students who read at their level and receive direct instruction from me in those groups several times each week.  They are also now expected to complete one reading response each week due on Friday.

We continue to use the Words Their Way spelling program to work with words and they do various tasks that are due on Thursday including their individual sorts where they sort individually and in partners and also do "speed sorting".  They also look for similar pattern words in the classroom, define words they don't know using the dictionary and learn how to use them in sentences as well as find them in their own reading.  

Stop by the classroom to see some of the work they have been doing!