Well, this post is a little late being that it is Sunday already.

Hopefully, you have enjoyed reading your Home Letters during the weekend. They should be signed and sent back with your child for Monday. The Home Letters are designed to give you some idea as to what your child may be doing throughout the week. However, you may have discovered that they leave with a slight sense of confusion as to what they may be referring to when they talk about various things in their letter. For the Home Letters, students were told to pick two topics to write about and write three sentences for that subject. For example, your child may have picked Math and the topic “test of ten” within that subject. Your child then wrote three sentences about “test of ten”. However, that was probably not nearly enough to get across the idea of what “test of ten” is. This is an excellent opportunity to start a conversation with your child. Armed with some curiosity and some idea what to ask, you can ask your child to elaborate on the topic. Instead of having nothing to ask but “What did you do this week?” you can instead ask them to give more detail on a specific topic.

Showing interest in what they are doing is key to developing positive relationships with your child. However, it’s hard. I know! I feel for you! Here is a way to start those conversations! Have fun!!

Well, tomorrow’s Friday and I am sure the students are ready for a break. WE had a busy day today. Today is our “to and fro” day, as we move from music to library to gym. The students hardly had any time to work at their new desks!

Students also had a small test today on the 1 and 0 times table. We are working towards a couple of tests in the next couple of weeks. Tomorrow, students will be have a timed quiz on their basic facts in addition and subtraction. This will be happening each Friday. It is important that students become fluent in these basic facts as it provides support or the other work they do in Math and leaves them less dependent on using their fingers.

Starting tomorrow, you will also start receiving “home letters”. These letters are written by the students and detail the activities we are doing in the class. I know you enjoy receiving newsletters from me but with these letters, students will get a chance to tell you, in their own words, all the things they have learned during the week. Also, it gives students a chance to review the learning of the week and embed that learning.

I have changed the settings for the blog to allow commenting without being a registered user of edublogs. However, you may not see your comment for a little bit as I have to approve all comments before they appear on the blog. Howeverm I would love to have parents commenting, responding to the students work, etc. I am hoping, down the road that we may be able to set up a book club where we post the book we are using for novel studies and parents can be involved as well, reading and commenting on the ideas from the book and the students suggestions. Anyway, any participation would be wonderful! We already have one person from Alaska who has left a comment!

Thank you to all the parents who sent their prayers and thoughts after my Gradfather’s passing. It was a difficult time but I was glad to get out there and be with family. I think we have a great class and class community!

Finally, I thought I would share this with all of you. Some may wonder why I would bother setting up a class blog and have students adding to the content of the blog, in addition to the other technology things we will be doing. I think this video gives some very good reasons why we should be doing all we can to have students working with technology safely and approprately. Enjoy!!

After having spent most of September with tables, our class now has desks. The class was very excited and enjoyed helping to move the old tables out and bring the new desks into the class. They are all set up and ready to use. Please come and see them if you have time!

We also started our new writing unit. Over the last month, we have been practicing letter writing. Letter writing may not be as speedy as e-mail these days but still survives as a useful skill for children to learn about. As a class, we talked about sending letters as thank you’s, letters asking for things and letters to keep friendships alive! Throughout the rest of the year, students will be writing letters home to you every Friday telling you about their week. There will also be a letter writing test on Wednesday. For our new unit students will be learning outlining skills. These outlining skills will help the students not only learn creative writing in smaller, more manageable chunks but will also help them with their report writing. The students started outlining today and are already excited.

The students don’t know this but we will also be using our new projector to display a computer screen on the wall.  This will help us do lots of creative things with the computer like using websites and Microsoft Office as a class.

Always exciting things happening in 3B!!

We have a lot of interesting things happening in our social class. We are getting ready for doing our very first voicethread. Today the students learned that a voicethread is a series of pictures and voice that tell a story or tell us about an event of importance to the students. Our first voicethread is going to be about Safe and Caring communities. The students have been discussing how they can make a community safe and caring and seperated them into things they can hear, things they can feel and things they can see. Some examples for things they can see, hear and feel are (the students are telling me these as I type) people talking nicely to each other, the sirons of police who protect us, seeing people biking and throwing garbage away in the trash can.

We can’t wait for you to see our voicethread!!!

Mr. H’s class.

Wow! What an exciting day!! We had a wonderful day today; playing, learning and having fun. The students had gym this morning where they are practicing their soccer skills. We did a few relays so the students could work on their dribbling.

We are continuing to work on our letter writing skills. The students are composing some very silly letters about a silly ride to school. I have read a few and they are very funny. The students are learning the proper format for letters and will later use these skills to write letters home to you to tell you about what they are doing at school.

Later on in the day, we read a silly story called “Hooway for Wodney Wat”, about a little rodent who used to be bullied but turns out to be a hero. The students really enjoyed it. We also continued looking at multiplication. Today, students learned the 0 and 1 times table and also learned that mulitplication can be written in three different ways. It can be written as 1×1, 1.1 or (1)(1). If you are looking for something to with your child at home, you can begin to paractice the times tables with them. Flash cards are easily made or can be purchased cheaply at grocery stores, dollar stores or other places.

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Math Game!!!

Here is a good math game to play as your child gets better at multiplication. Take 2 pieces of paper and, going down each page, write 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89 and so on until you get to 149. Put a line beside each one as well to checkmark them as you complete the game.

The goal of the game is to fill in every line with a check before the other player. To do this, roll two dice, multiply the numbers together and place a checkmark next to the series of numbers where it would be placed. For example, if I rolled a 5 and a 3, 5×3=15 and I would place a checkmark on the line beside 10-19 as it would fall between those numbers. If you multiply two numbers together and you already have that line checked, you miss your number.

Have fun!!

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Have a great weekend!!! Come back everyday for news and other neat stuff from Mr. H’s class!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the first blog post of Mr. Hancock’s grade 3 class. We are all very excited about our class blog though the students do not know a whole lot about it yet. This is also new to me as I have never done a blog with students.

We are hoping to do a lot of exciting things through the blog. This will be another form of communication for you as parents to get a glimpse of what is happening in the class. We are hoping to add some podcasts, pictures and other things. We will not be showing actual pictures of students or using their names or any other personal information.

One of the neat things about this blog is that you will get to see what is happening in the class. You will be able to see some of the ideas we have generated for class projects, hear audio of students talking about things they have learned, hear about the stories we are reading and perhaps read along with us! Students will use this to publish stories, poems and other student created materials. The idea is to give students a sense of ownership over their material as well as to give them the idea that their work can have a life outside the classroom. It is not just work for a mark. There are people out there who are interested in what we have to say!!

I am looking forward to starting this exciting project. We will be starting to add stuff next week starting on Monday! Join us then!!!

Mr. Hancock’s Grade 3 class