Week 4 Update

 October 2, 2020

Dear Parents,

It was nice to see you on Wednesday for the Virtual Meet the Teacher night. I hope I didn’t go too fast through the information. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. 

Brace yourself - this is a longer weekly update than normal!

Here is what we covered this week:

Language:

We finished the Ryan’s Well EQAO reading sample and answered the short response questions. This is a really challenging area for most students. They often have the correct answers, but have great difficulty expressing their understanding in writing. This is something we will continue to work throughout the year. Here is a link that helps to explain how to effectively answer a short response question. It is also in this upcoming week’s workspace. 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11H9wrqfZXZMEta4EaI_IKq8CV_zTz2pWAf127ImsBkw/edit?usp=sharing

We also began writing about our mystery gifts, which turned out to be Poprocks! We had the students eat the poprocks and then write down what they tasted like, felt like, smelled like, etc. On Thursday and Friday, we wrote a descriptive paragraph about them. We introduced similes and are encouraging students to use them in their writing as well. For example: “The pop rocks exploded in my mouth like a strawberry bomb”. We will continue writing next week with a description of a winter wonderland. Hopefully a “winter wonderland” doesn’t come too soon this year!

At home, you can help your child to develop his/her descriptive skills, by encouraging them to use descriptive adjectives when they are speaking and try to use similes. For example, if your child is telling you about a character in a show, rather than saying, “the character was weird”, you might encourage them to try to describe the character using more detail - eventually getting to something like “the character had long, scraggly hair that looked like a bird’s nest, and his clothes looked like a wrinkly bedsheet.”

Math:

In math, we finished up Patterning and had a small assessment on Wednesday, and then played Plickers on Friday for a little more of a fun assessment. We began learning about 2D shapes with a sorting activity that we will finish on Monday. 

Next week, we are going to be learning about 2D shapes. We will be learning how to sort them using Venn diagrams, we will identify the characteristics of a variety of 2D shapes and will learn how to compose and decompose 2D shapes. 

This will all be on the workspace (with some helpful videos) next week. Again, the workspace is only to be used if your child is absent. We are following the workspace during the week in class. This should help your child keep up with the class should he/she have to be away for a few days. 

Science:

Our first unit in science is about Strong and Stable Structures. We have just begun to learn about what a structure is, and what the words, strong and stable mean. Next week, we will be learning about natural and manmade structures, and doing an experiment about how to make a structure more stable by adding more mass to the base. We will also begin to think about other ways we could change the base to make it more stable. 

Homework:

Below is the link for this week’s homework, just so you can see it. I will also post it on a workspace specifically for Homework. The easiest way to complete the homework is to do it on the google doc, and then submit the doc in Hapara when it is finished. I will show students the workspace and how to use it so they can access it. 

Homework will begin this week, October 5th.  

Unless otherwise noted, homework will be shared electronically on a weekly basis. It will be shared on Fridays and will be due the following Friday. To access the homework, students will need to sign into a computer using the Chrome browser, using their school login. School logins all follow the same pattern: firstname.lastname@ocsbstudent.ca. Then they input their password. Students have been using the chromebooks in class, and they all know how to log in. Once they log into the computer, they should go to the St. Anne Website. 

From here, they will go to the "Student Portal".  Once they click on this portal, they will see a purple icon called "Hapara" (Workspace and Student Dashboard).  They will click this icon.  It is here that they may need their email address and password to log in again - usually only the first time they access it from home.  Once they do so, they will see a workspace called: Homework Workspace for 3A 2020-2021.

Here is a video that explains how to access the Hapara workspaces in general: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KE7lDTMtHQqJrgh9fQ2zGMMwKTBrBzIN/view

I will post all of the weekly homework assignments on this workspace.  They will be dated accordingly.

Your child can log in and out as many times as needed.  If I would like something printed out and sent to me, I will note that on the homework sheet. For example, there may be math problems in which I would like to see your child's work and/or thinking process - how they solved the problem. This would be easier to do with paper and pencil. In this case, I will ask that your child send their finished work to school.

When your child finishes the homework for that week, all they have to do is remember to press "SUBMIT".  This will let me know that they have completed the homework and that I can go ahead and look it over.

The homework that will be sent home each week is a review of the different learning goals the children are/will be practising at school, and some concepts that we may not have a chance to practise. I would encourage students to complete their homework, but as I said at the Meet the Teacher meeting, it is not going to be formally assessed, and is more for practice than anything else. It is a good life skill, and shows responsibility. If you are unable to complete it, or can only complete parts of it in a week, that is fine. A note in the agenda to let me know would be helpful. Thank you!

As well, for homework, I am asking that your child reads for about 20 minutes each night. Whatever they are happiest reading is perfect. 

They will have a short spelling quiz on Fridays with the Word Wall Words that are on the homework sheet. The Word Wall Words will also be posted on this website under "Word Wall Words". Three or four number words will be added to the Word Wall Words, as one of the curriculum expectations for Grade Three Math is: "read and print in words, whole numbers to 100".

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Here is the link for this week’s homework. Please have your child access it through Hapara when they work on it, or print it and send it in. 

Thank you again for all your support. Have a great weekend!

Yours,

Chris Pouliot