Dear Division 11 Families, 

We hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend so far! 

Family Reading on Tuesday
This coming Tuesday is our first Family Reading session! Please join us in the classroom on Tuesday morning until 9:15 to read with your child. We will be holding Family Reading every Tuesday and look forward to seeing you there! 

Here are some of the fun learning activities our students explored this week: 

World Kindness Day
We celebrated World Kindness Day on Wednesday. Our students brainstormed words, phrases, and actions that spread kindness. Then, we partnered with Division 18 to decorate the undercover area with words and pictures to brighten someone’s day and remind everyone to be kind. 

Social Studies
Our students reflected on their learning from the past few weeks. They practiced self-reflection as learners by: 

• Identifying what they are proud of as learners 
• Sharing interesting or memorable things they’ve learned 
• Considering what they would do differently next time 
• Writing down any wonderings they have 

Developing the ability to reflect on their learning is something we are working on in Grade 3 across all subject areas. Through guidance and modeling, our students are making great strides in becoming reflective learners! 

We are writers.
We continued working on descriptive writing this week. The students wrote about their homes, focusing on adding details, examples, and emotions to make their writing more vivid and engaging. 

We are readers.

We also reviewed letter sounds: short vowels (with hand signs to remember) and long vowels, blends where you hear both blended sounds (bl, cl, sl, br, cr, st, sw), and the difference between digraphs where the combination of letters changes the sounds (ch, sh, th, wh with hand signs to remember).

It is common for many readers at this age to set goals to read bigger words successfully. When readers look at longer words, sometimes they don’t know the strategy for how to break up the word into smaller chunks. So we learned one strategy by looking at the consonants and vowels in the words. Look at this example: carpenter

What we know: Every syllable has a vowel sound. Label whether each letter is a vowel or a consonant. Split the longer word in between the two consonants:

car – pen – ter

Now, they can see the word as 3 smaller combinations and it makes it easier to sound out.

Ways to support at home: When you are reading with your child, have a piece of paper at the ready to write down words they may struggle with sounding out. Ask them to figure out the consonants and vowels like we did with carpenter. Ask them to split the word in between letters where there are two consonants. Then ask them to read each syllable at a time. We know this is just one strategy but it gives them another tool in their toolbox.

We are artists.

Our students learned about how perspective is used in art to make drawings on a flat surface, like paper, appear more realistic. We explored the work of Patrick Hughes, an artist who creates reverspective (reverse + perspective) art. The students were fascinated by his work! Currently, they are sketching their own rooms, and in the coming week, we’ll begin transforming these sketches into three-dimensional artworks. 

We are mathematicians.

We continued learning about fractions and learned how to compare numbers using our place value place mats. Next week, we will review how to order numbers from smallest to greatest and vice versa.

We started learning about number concepts and place value. Each number has a value depending on where they are placed.

How to support at home:

Set aside deck of cards specifically for math games this year. Remove the Jack and King. The Ace = 1 and the Queen = 0 (zero) because it looks like a 0.

GAME: Create two place value charts like this to practice comparing numbers to 1000 (and later ordering numbers to 100):

1. Divide the deck into even piles. One for you and one for your child.
2. Sit side by side so it’s easier to compare numbers. You may wish to place one place value chart above the other one so it’s even easier to compare.
3. Both flip over 3 cards to make a number on your own place value chart placing the first card in the Ones place, the second card in the Tens place, and the last card in the Hundreds place.
4. Compare the numbers in the hundreds place. Which number is larger? If it is the same, then compare the number in the Tens place. Discuss why you compare the number in the hundreds place and not the ones place.
5. Whoever has the bigger number gets to keep all of the cards.

Help your child see that these numbers also represent: 823 = 800+20+3 and 409 = 400+9 so 800 is greater than 400 even though the 9 is bigger than the 3 in the ones place.

We can reflect.

Students worked so hard last week on their self-reflection on their learning this first term. We had an opportunity to think about their work habits, how they contribute to our classroom community by being good listeners, helpful, and kind. We also reflected on what we are proud of, how we improved, and set specific goals for further development.

ADST

We used the laptops on Friday. To streamline our log in experience, please help your child memorize their login username, email address, and password. It takes up valuable time to troubleshoot and look up IDs and passwords which affects their experience and that of others who have memorized theirs. Please send Ms. Chan an email if you need it sent to you again. Thank you so much for your support!

SpacesEDU

Thank you to parents who filled out the SpacesEDU online form. If you haven’t yet, you will be receiving an email reminder. Thank you!

Ice Skating

We are so grateful to the families who volunteered to help drive our skaters to Bill Copeland on November 26, December 3 & 10th. It truly is incredible to see how first time or beginning skaters step on the ice for the first time go from feeling fear to skating around in just 3 sessions! It’s a great lesson on growth mindset!

Thank you for your continued support. To see the number of people reading our weekly blog posts makes us feel valued for our time to share about the fun, engaging, and meaningful things we are learning in our classroom. We appreciate you!

Sincerely, Ms. Kim and Ms. Chan