Kenneth D. Taylor, Grade 3 - Ms. Hargreaves

The Scholastic Book Fair will be in school October 3 -7.  Students can bring money to purchase books on Thursday morning, if they wish.  Otherwise they can do so during the parent teacher conferences. October 6            Parent Teacher Interviews 3:30 pm to 7:30 pm October 7            Parent Teacher Interviews 8:00 am to 1:00 pm  No School for students Thank you.  

This morning we all participated in the Terry Fox Run, everybody persisted, just like Terry Fox.   We had many literature connections to persistence and characters in the books we have been reading.  All of these characters stuck with their passions, beliefs, and ideas. I have sent home the Raz-Kids log on information today.  Each student has their own log on card and there is a parent letter that gives the instructions for the site location and the log on information.  Raz- Kids will be our home reading program for grade 3. The expectation is that all students will read 1 or 2 books every night for homework.    Each book has a quiz and this will help them work on their reading powers and comprehension strategies. Another exciting learning task we did today was a Maker challenge to work within groups to come up with ideas together to design either a musical instrument or a robot.  Both of these designs are connected to the science and math ...

Formative Feedback   helps us move our thinking and learning forward.  I am noticing that you are all learning how to give specific ideas to each other to take your work to the next level.  We really got to work on this when we gave specific feedback to improve our painting technique this afternoon.  You grow and learn every day because you are paying attention to your thinking, listening to your thinking voice and beginning to understand yourselves as learners. We talked at the end of today about my amazing discovery on Tuesday evening when I got home.  I couldn't believe it ... sitting on the road in my alley was a Red Shinned Hawk.  It wasn't in a tree or on a fence, it was sitting on the ground, I walked carefully over to it and it didn't move except to look at me.  Very odd behavior for a hawk!  It made me ask all kinds of questions, and make all kinds of inferences.   So, I asked you to make some inferences on how the hawk might hav...

Today we had our very first fire drill at Ken Taylor School.  Talk to your parents about how you feel you did, using the bull's eye.  Think about your goal for doing an even more amazing job on the next one. We continued to work on our Picasso Portraits and watched a video about Cubism.  There is a link for this video under learning links on the blog.  We had some amazing conversation about how Picasso chose certain colors to represent different feelings in his paintings.  Color is very symbolic and you were making fabulous connections to color words and similes.  Red reminds me of the molten lava in a volcano.  So, a simile might be:  when I'm angry, I feel anger that is  so red I'm like a volcano ready to erupt.  Adding similes and descriptive language is a  current goal we are working on for moving our writing forward.  Your mindful color choice water color paint color in your portraits shows that you understand the connec...

Well done everyone on your great effort today doing the digital numeracy Student Learning Assessment.  You all persisted and applied your math skills to solve these problems. This afternoon we learned about cubism and were inspired to try out Pablo Picasso's drawing style.  This learning task gave us many connections back to geometry and 2D polygons as well as 3D objects.  We've been exploring how important polygons are in buildings, bridges and now art.  Here are a couple of pictures to show off your efforts with prototype 1 of your Picasso Identity paintings.  You all persisted and were committed to practicing your technique, you took on feedback and you learned from each other.

Just wanted to let you know that if they would like to make a donation students can bring $2.00 to give to the Terry Fox Foundation when we do our run on Friday morning.  Thank you.

Well done today on our first written task for the Student Learning Assessments.  It was a task that sparked many personal connections and gave you an opportunity to demonstrate your writing skills.  How well do you think you did?  Where would you place yourself on the bulls eye and why? I was really impressed with your observations, questions and inferences today when we looked at the photos from the East Village.  You are increasing your understanding of the strategies that good readers use.  The OWI (O = Observe, W = Wonder, I = Inference) chart is a really powerful thinking tool that we will be using all year.  It helps you understand your thinking and makes you more mindful about the strategies you are using to make sense of text and pictures.  Here is an example of the OWI chart, it can be used in any task to examine artifacts to transform your understanding.  I've included one of the photos we looked at today so you can share it w...

Friday, September 23rd is a non-instructional day, which means students will not be coming to school.

Wow, our third week of school is already over, well done grade 3's!  Today was another great day of thinking while doing the Student Learning Assessments.  You were very flexible and demonstrated a growth mindset today when we used the ACER PCs instead of the Mac Air Books like yesterday. We talked about Canadian hero Terry Fox today and it gave us many text-self and text-text connections to making change and not giving up.  We learned a new word: legacy .  A legacy is a gift from someone that will make you a better person.  Terry Fox was committed to raising money for cancer research.  He was someone who believed he could make a difference and he never gave up.  Terry Fox believed the message of hope.  The Terry Fox Foundation's message is "working together to outrun cancer."  Next Friday we will run together as a school community to carry on this message of hope.  We have been practicing building our running stamina and endurance in ...

September 21st is International Peace Day so it was quite fitting that we finished our story Be The Change.  This book is really a great example of the reading power Transform.  Not only did the main character transform his thinking and learn the important life lesson about being able to choose the right and most peaceful action in the moment, but so did we!   Here is a link to find out what this day is all about:   International Day of Peace . We started the Student Learning Assessments today and I am so proud of how focused you were to do the best job you could.  Thank you.  These tasks certainly gave you all a chance to use your reading powers.

Today we learned about the 4 C's that all 21st century learners use.  They communicate their thoughts, they collaborate with each other to share their thinking, they think critically about ideas and solutions and most importantly they create .  We started today with a learning task called think outside of the box.  Students had a page with an image on it and they had to decide what it could be.  There is an obvious idea, but there are many more creative ones too.  This task gave us an opportunity to use all of the 4 C's:  we communicated our ideas in groups, we collaborated because we used global mind to share our brilliant thinking, we thought critically about the reasons we chose our designs and finally, we created our sketches to show our thinking. Here are some wonderful examples for you to see:

Another new week in Room 123.  We worked hard today to log onto to our brand new computers in preparation for the Student Learning Assessments.  We used Microsoft Word to answer the following question:  What does quality of life mean to us?  I was really proud of all of the great ideas that we brainstormed together.  Here are some of our thoughts: Having a good quality of life means: I have loving parents and grandparents. I get to spend time with my family. I have clean water to drink and healthy food to eat. I get to go to school to learn. I have clean air to breathe. I can read. I have pets. I have shelter (a nice house to live in). I have warm clothes to wear. I have money to buy things. I have friends. I have doctors and hospitals to keep me healthy. I can watch TV Police officers, firefighters, keep me safe. We will begin to compare our own quality of life in Canada to children our age in India, Tunisia, Peru and the Ukraine.  How is ...

Dear Parents/Guardians, Our class will use digital media to enhance, differentiate, and personalize student learning. As discussed at the Parent Evening, the use of headphones is encouraged for the upcoming SLA’s. Please enclose your child’s headphones or ear buds into a labeled Zip-Loc bag and send to school as soon as possible.   We will keep the headphones or ear buds in the classroom until the end of the school year, and send them back home in June. Thank you for your support! Grade 3 Teachers

Today we continued building our fit minds by reviewing what we know about polygons.  Check out the link to quizlet under math in the learner links tab on the blog.  This is place to practice your knowledge of polygons. Connecting  back to our reading of the book by Marilyn Burns called The Greedy Triangle we wrote our own stories titled:   If I were a polygon, I would be a ...   because ... Here is a link to a read aloud video of the book:   The Greedy Triangle Read Aloud We began reading an amazing book called:   Be the Change: A Grandfather Gandhi Story.  This is a brilliant book for transforming our thinking.   Global Citizenship is a theme in  grade 3 social studies and this book shows us how no matter how big or small you are, you can choose the right actions.  You can make a difference in your community and the world.  The main idea of this book fits wonderfully with our heart values at Ken Taylor, parti...

We continued our exploration of  polygons today.  We discovered that the word polygon means many angles.   poly = many,  and gon = angles.  Polygons have certain properties: 1.  they must be closed shapes 2.  they can not have curves 3.  they have vertices, angles and edges 4.  they are 2 dimensional 5.  there are regular and irregular polygons Here is a link to a video all about polygons that we watched:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaoZhhx_I9s We learned that a polygon's name comes from the number of sides that it has.  Ask your child to tell you about the names for the different polygons we looked at today.  We are beginning to deconstruct words in their parts.  For example, tri = 3, so a 3 sided polygon is called a triangle. Our big question for exploration today was:  Why did bees choose the hexagon to build their hives?  Thank you all for your amazing thinking about why this was th...

Parent Night: Our Curriculum Night – on Thursday, September 15th is from 6:00 – 8:00 pm; this will be a great first opportunity for you to learn about some key things your child’s teacher wants you to know and will provide an opportunity for you to ask questions. There will two repeating presentations from each teacher and then time for you to ask questions afterwards. This time will facilitate the connections between home and school and better prepare us for the first conferences in early October. Please drop in to the appropriate sessions with your child’s teacher.

Today we worked on another reading power strategy called inferencing.  As we read we ask questions and then our brains automatically want to come up with answers to these questions.  We use the evidence in front of us, and our background knowledge to fill in gaps in the text.  Take a look at this picture to see what inferencing is:

Today we worked on mindful focus which included learning tasks for our brains and our bodies because we know that when the two are in balance, there is no stopping our thinking.  We continued on our exploration of what identity means as grade 3 students.  Here is a picture of some of the identity webs that you created today. Notice how different they all are because each one of you has their own identity. Creating mind maps like these help us make connections to each other but also to the community and the world.  We can ask the question:  How is our quality of life different from the life of other grade 3 students in different countries?  Hmm, What inferences can you make about this question?  

What a wonderful first week of school we had.  I want to say thank to you all of you for your big thinking!  I am very impressed with  how you take on the feedback and adjust your actions to be the best Grade 3 students you can be.  Today we learned about the  values we will display everyday at school.  The symbol that we have created  at Ken Taylor to help us remember these values is a heart.  Each letter in the word hearth represents a value: Fit Friday's focus was on building the physical fitness of our bodies and our brains.   All of the learning activities we did today allowed us to practice and live the above values.  In our Physical Education (P.E.) class we practiced mindfulness, empathy and acceptance by working in teams to mirror each other's body movements.  We worked on helpfulness, acceptance and truthfulness by playing cooperative games such as Hungry Hippo.  I'm so proud of how you are all learning how to ta...

Today was a big day for us at Ken Taylor School, because it was our very first assembly.  We listened to a special story called, The Three Questions by Jon J. Muth.    This story is a fable which means that it gives the reader an important life lesson. The main character in this story is Nikolai a young boy who wants to be the best person he can be.  He asks his animal friends these three questions:  When is the best time to do things?, Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?  He discovers that "There is only one important time, and that time is now.  The most important one is always the one you are with.  And the most import thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side."   This story gave us many text to self connections back to our learning so far this year and going forward.  All big thinkers ask questions, which allow us to grow and become more mindful about paying attention in the mom...

We have been talking in class about the problems that plastic can cause for the environment, especially in the oceans.   We found a problem , which is connected to all the plastic bubble wrap that came with all of our new supplies at Ken Taylor School.  We decided to do a design challenge to come up with ways of upcycling (turning the bubble wrap into some else so that it doesn't end up in the landfill) bubble wrap. The question is:  How can we upcycle bubble wrap? Here are some photos of our collaborative ideation sessions.   Ideate means come up with as many ideas as you can in groups.   Ideate comes from putting the words idea and create together. Students worked in groups of three and they collaborated to come up with as many ways to use the bubble wrap as they could.  These ideas were recorded in their Thought Journals.  

Today is Wondering Wednesday, which means we ask all kinds of questions. We learned what metacognition is today.  Ask your child to tell you about it. We have also been discussing mindfulness, specifically how our actions impact each other and the earth. Here is a video that talks about what mindfulness is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS_RdghyX0E

Welcome to grade 3! What an exciting year of learning we have to look forward to. This is a space for us to connect, and to share our learning adventures.  We will be sharing photos, questions and learning links connected to our learning.  We will be using the design mindsets to problem find and collaborate on possible solutions.