Mrs. Payne's Grade Three Class: 2018

Saturday 1 December 2018

December News 2018

Important Dates to Remember!

December 4- After school skating is held every Tuesday at 3:15 at ATB! It’s free and fun!

December 6- Christmas Gala at MMH! 6:00-7:30 pm Everyone is invited! This is a come and go event, pop in and out, or stay for the whole event.

December 11- Hot Lunch Day

December 13- Carolling in the gym 6:30pm hosted by MMH school council

December 13- Bussed Fieldtrip to Galt Museum: Ukrainian Connections (12:50-2:10)- see attached note

December 17-Christmas carols singalong in the gym 12:30

December 18-21-Christmas carols singalong in the gym 8:30am

December 18- Magic of Christmas (MMH gym: 6:30 pm) This event will showcase the MMH Senior Choir and Hand Bell Choir. Choir members should dress in their Christmas best and be at the school by 6:15pm.

December 20- Bussed Fieldtrip to Nicholas Sheran Ice Arena Skating (1:00-2:00) - see attached note/ Wear Red and Green today!

December 22-January 6- Happy Holidays!

January 7- First day back

Saturday 3 November 2018

November News 2018

Thanks so much to everyone who sent treats for our party ! They were delicious. The kids had fun parading through the halls and I’m sure they had a great night of trick or treating! Also, thank you to the many parent volunteers who helped supervise our Helen Schuler fieldtrip! Here’s a look at our month of November!

LA: Home reading bookmark challenge continues. Each night read earns a hole punch in card.

Reading Strategies: Building a Reading Life continues/ Novel: Stone Fox

Finished Understanding the Story/Readers Check for Comprehension 1. Who is in this part 2. What just happened 3. Does this fit with something that already happened, or is this new? / What mind work is the text signalling me to do? Envision a mental movie or collect information to make a list/ predicting and retelling

November Lessons: Tackling Hard words takes grit/ Readers Climb the Hurdle of hard words by: chunking words/ thinking about the story/using textual clues to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words: gist, synonyms, antonyms, explanation, prefixes/ making sense of figurative language/ talking back to the text/ considering the author’s purpose

Writing Strategies: Crafting True Stories Unit continues

To write a true story:

1. make a mental movie of what happened, telling it in small detail, bit by bit.

2. Remember your writing goals

3. Rehearse for your writing by storytelling like Robert Munsch

4. Try different leads for your story (will you start with action, dialogue, or setting?)

5. Write a flash draft

6. Revise

Math: Numbers to 1000 Unit

Science: Finishing Hearing and Sound

Testing Materials and Designs Unit starting soon

Social: Quality of Life in 4 countries of study: India, Peru, Ukraine, Tunisia

Themes: Remembrance Day

Big Ideas: Growth Mindset with Mojo

Seven Sacred Teachings: Bravery/Bear

Spelling Program Update

Congratulations on a great start to our spelling program! The kids are doing well with their lists and are mastering a ton of new words and patterns. I am excited to see that many of them are getting their 2 mystery challenge words correct on their tests, this tells me they have internalized the pattern and can generalize it to new words! Way to go! They love their partner practise time using games like tic tac toe and have individual practise time doing regular sorts, speed sorts, and a choice of word searches, ABC order, or sentence creation tasks. Thanks so much for your help at home with this program! I can see the results of our combined efforts already!

How to Book Your Parent Teacher Interview

November is always an exciting time with the opportunity for teachers and parents to celebrate student learning through the interview process. Parent Teacher Interviews will take place at MMH in November. Grade 1 to 5 interviews are scheduled for November 22. Instructions on how to book your parent teacher interview are here!

Step 1: Open to Parents Thursday, November 1. To register, please click on the “Parent Teacher Interview” button on the home page or under the “Quick Links” section of our website http://mmh.lethsd.ab.ca. Please click the “Register for an account” link (as shown below).

Step 2: Enter all the information into the required fields. Please make sure to select Parent in the “Tell us who you are?” drop down menu and then hit submit.

Step 3: Once you have successfully logged in please select the date you wish to schedule a time.

Step 4: Book Your Parent-Teacher Interview - You will see the teacher’s schedule. From the times listed please select one and click the “Book” button. After booking your appointments you can print off your schedule. You can log into the system at any time to view your bookings, print, cancel or reschedule appointments by going to the specific day you have booked and at the bottom of the page view your appointment time by clicking on “View my Parent Teacher Interview Schedule”. You can also book additional appointments with other teachers as well. Please do not call the office if you have forgotten your time. Unfortunately, the office is not staffed to handle this volume of calls.

Step 5: Write down your interview time(s) for future reference. Step 6: Please attend your Parent-Teacher Interview on time.

Important Dates to Remember

Nov. 5-Deadline to order hot lunch

Nov. 8- Booster Juice Day/ pick up fundraiser orders

Nov. 9-Remembrance Day assembly 10:30 in the gym

Nov. 12-No School- Remembrance Day

Nov. 13 -No School Professional Learning Day

Nov. 14- school council meets at 7pm

Nov. 15-Roc Your Mocs Day

Nov. 20- Hot Lunch Day for Gr. 1,2,3/Report Cards come home

Nov. 21- Dress Up as your favourite Animal Day/ Earth Rangers 2:00

Nov. 22- no school for students due to parent teacher interviews 8:30am-8pm please sign up online/instructions included in this letter

Nov. 23-No school professional learning day

Nov. 29 Spirit Assembly 10:20 am in the gym

Sunday 30 September 2018

October Newsletter 2018

It’s hard to believe that it’s already October! The first month of Grade 3 has flown by! We’ve been working hard on learning routines and have jumped into all our beginning units. Here’s a quick peek at what’s been going on and what’s coming in the four cores!

LA: Home reading book mark challenge: Check out the What's New sidebar link to our One District One Book coming March 2019!

Reading Strategies: Read like books are gold! / Choose within reach books/Set goals

Writing Strategies: Crafting True Stories/ I remember/Map it out/ think about someone important

Math: Patterning Unit/Math Number Games coming soon

Science: Scientific Method/ Hearing and Sound Unit

Social: Mapping Unit

Themes: BFG, Fire Prevention Week, Thanksgiving, Halloween

7 Sacred Teachings: Respect

Spelling Program

We started our spelling patterns program this month called Words Their Way and spelling lists will come home every other Monday in agendas and will be practised for 2 weeks. The students will be working on these words in school but will also need to practise at home. Please take 10-15 minutes each night to help your child cut apart word lists and sort them according to the pattern.

Spelling tests will happen every other Friday (unless there is no school, then we will have it on Thursday). I have completed a spelling inventory of your child’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to spelling patterns and have grouped them so each child is getting instruction on the patterns they struggled with. We do word sorts and hunts with these patterns throughout the two-week rotation with the goal to help your child recognize these spelling patterns and to apply them to other words rather than just memorizing for the test. The goal is to apply the patterns during real world writing or typing.

Thanks so much for your help getting this program up and running! Your time at home is greatly appreciated and I hope to see some great gains for our spellers this year!

Important Dates to Remember

Oct. 1- Fall Fundraiser Kick Off/ ORANGE SHIRT DAY

Oct. 8 NO SCHOOL Thanksgiving Holiday

Oct. 9 NO SCHOOL Professional Learning Day: Literacy Day

Oct. 10 Walk to school day

Oct. 11-16^th Scholastic Book Fair 8:00 – 4:00 / except Friday 14th 8:00 – 11:40.

Oct. 16 Deadline for Fundraiser orders

Oct. 18 Dismissal at 11:40 today/NO SCHOOL in afternoon Professional Learning Day

Oct. 19 Professional Learning day: NO SCHOOL

Oct. 22 Deadline for Booster Juice orders

Oct. 23 Hot Lunch

Oct. 24 Picture retake day

Oct. 25 Spirit Assembly 12:30 Wear Blue and Gold

Oct. 30 1:00 Fieldtrip to Helen Schuler Busses will be provided-supervisors needed see attached

Oct. 31 Halloween Parade 12:30 (kids change into costumes at lunch) (Thanks for volunteering to send treats for our party, if you signed up you will be receiving an email/dojo soon! We have 19 students and no nut allergies.

October 1, 2018

Dear Parents,

The Grade 3 Team has decided to take the kids to Helen Schuler to the Sounding Off presentation as part of our Science curriculum. Mrs. Payne’s and Mrs. Moore’s class will be going on Tuesday, October 30^th from 1:00-2:20.

We have booked and paid for busses to transport the children therefore parent drivers are NOT required. However, we will still need a couple of parents to either ride the bus with the class or simply meet us at the Nature Centre to help supervise.

If you are able to meet us at Helen Schuler to help with supervising students please return the bottom portion of this letter to your child’s teacher or send a quick message on Class Dojo.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Please return this portion of this letter by Friday, October 12^th)

Student Name: ________________________________________

____ I can supervise children at Helen Schuler and will meet you there.

____ I have already filled in a driver’s form this year.

____ I can supervise children at Helen Schuler and will ride the bus with you.

______________________________

(Parent’s name & phone #)

Sunday 4 February 2018

Grade 3 Looking At Lethbridge PBL

Here are a few pictures from our visiting councillor and architect to kick off our Looking at Lethbridge Project! Thanks so much to Lethbridge City Councillor Ryan Parker for stopping by to talk with all of our Grade 3 students and also to Jessie Potrie from FWBA Architects for explaining the fine details of architecture design.

Students will be making blueprints for their projects this week and will need a piece of cardboard roughly 15 X 18inches to build their structures on. If you could send a piece of cardboard by February 26th that would be perfect! Thanks a bunch!

February Newsletter 2018

Reading Strategies: Character Studies/ Readers notice how a new character talks and acts/getting to know a character as a friend/following a character’s journey / comparing and contrasting characters across books

Writing Strategies: Changing the World/Opinion Writing Unit continues. We’ve worked on finding and solving problems both large and small and just yesterday wrote a letter to mom and dad trying to persuade you to buy a pet! I must admit they had some convincing arguments! We will continue with this type of writing for February using the OREO format: Opinion, Reasons, Examples, Opinion (restated)/brave bold thesis statements/ consider your audience/

Math: We’ve finished skip counting, money, addition, and subtraction, and have started multiplication! In Grade 3 kids need to know their times tables facts to 5X5. We are learning that if we can skip count, we can learn our facts quickly! We know the parts of a multiplication equation including the terms product and factors and talked about the commutative property which tells us that if 5X1=5 then 1X5= 5.

Science: Looking at Lethbridge Project! We are becoming Engineers for our Building With a Variety of Materials unit. We were lucky to have councillor Ryan Parker come to our school to talk about some of the criteria, problems, and constraints of building in Lethbridge followed by Jessie Potrie , the architect who helped design Coalbanks Elementary. He presented some inspiring designs and shared some 3D models of his work to get the kids excited about their own building projects. The kids did a survey to find out what type of building was needed on the west side, narrowed down their choices, graphed their results, and came up with their number one building choice. There will be a letter coming home soon asking for materials to build the final project. We will be drawing up blueprints in the next few weeks and construction will be underway soon!

Social: Traditions and Celebrations in all 4 countries continues! A study guide will be coming home in a few weeks with a quiz to follow which should give the kids lots of time to prepare.

Word Work Themes: Valentines Day

Big Ideas: Entrepreneurial Spirit: I am creative, innovative, and ready to take on a challenge. I am on time, I come prepared to learn, I use class time wisely, I complete assigned tasks, and I accept feedback

Skating Fieldtrip: Thanks to those who have already volunteered to drive to skating on Feb. 16th . ~~We are in need of a few more so please return the bottom of the form if you are able to help out, or email/Dojo me! Thanks so much!~~ We are covered for drivers! Thank you!!

Important Dates to Remember in February!

Feb 6 - Choir

Feb 6 - Town Hall Meeting

Feb 7 - School Council

Feb 9 - No School, Professional Learning Day

Feb 9 - Hot Lunch Deadline

Feb 13 - Choir

Feb 14 - Happy Valentine's Day/ Class Party in the PM

Feb 15 - Jersey/Team Shirt Day

Feb 15 - Spirit Assembly

Feb 16 - Grade 3 Skating at the ATB Centre 10-11am-
we have all our drivers now! thank you everyone!

Feb 19 - No School Family Day

Feb 20-23 No School- Reading Week & Teacher’s Convention

Feb 26 - Random Acts of Kindness

Feb 27 - Random Acts of Kindness

Feb 27 - Hot Lunch Grades 1, 2, 3

Feb 27 - Choir

Feb 28 - Pink Shirt Day

Feb 28 - Hot Lunch Grades 4, 5

Our Valentine’s Class Party will be the afternoon of Wednesday, February 14^th.

Thank you to the following people for providing snacks:

Veggies Tray: Avery

Crackers and cheese: AddyM.

Fruit tray: Zander

Cookies or muffins: Calum

Drinks and plates: Ronin

Meat and pickles: Caleb

~~We are in need of a few more items, if anyone would like to help out, please just text/email/Dojo! Thanks a bunch!~~
Thanks so much everyone! We are now covered for snacks! :)