Police Band Visits Seisen

Third graders have been in the Christmas spirit with many different events this month. Last week the Police Band visited. At the end, three third graders gave speeches and presented flowers. 

３年生Advance クラス　「スイミー音読」
Grade 3 Advance Class Reading aloud Swimmy
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Grade 3s create exciting Carol Night choreography

How do we come up with all the expressive moment the audience sees at Carol Night? Through collaboration and lots of hard work. The Grade 3 students brainstormed and chose their dance movements working in house groups. Final decisions were made and, next week, we'll be practicing together to make them fluent, unified and strong.

Here are principled students watching others perform.

Click this link to see each house group's choreography ideas. It's the middle of our creative process before deciding on which movements we'll do as a whole grade. You'll see their final choice on stage!

Grade 3 are Going Places in the Media Centre

After learning about book trailers and watching one,

Grade 3 students really enjoyed listening to the story to see if it was as good as the trailer.
It was!

Students said...

“If you think together and work very well, you could make changes.”
“Be courageous.  Be who you are.”

“Teamwork - we should put our brains together and cooperate.”

“Even though other people are doing something, you don’t have to do the same thing as everyone else.  You could do something on your own.”

“It’s okay to be different.  Some people may not agree but you could be creative.  It doesn’t always have to be the same.”

Science Museum Field Trip (Nov. 4, 2015)

The girls had great fun exploring the science museum, especially the 'Machine Room'. They experienced forces like gravity and pushes and pulls first hand and how simple and compound machines can help us do work. The videos below show some of the machines they used.

Yoga in Dance Class

Students in Grade Three have been working on healthy movement choices in dance class. They began by exploring Brain Dance warm-ups, yoga poses, and high energy jazz/ hip hop movement from the flash mob "Say Hey (I Love You)." Students really enjoyed the calm they felt while doing yoga, so each student created her very own "vinyasa" or yoga sequence. Students chose several poses and linked them together in a smooth flow, then collaborated with a partner to share ideas.

Heiwa No Mori Field Trip

The Grade Three Field Trip to Heiwa no Mori was a lot of fun. In the videos below you will see many girls from 3A and 3B exploring and playing. What a great way to finish our unit on Healthy Choices and begin our next unit on Forces and Motion!

Student-Created Homophone Game

A few third graders who finished their biographies early used the extra time to create homophone games. Can you make it to the end? Give it a try and good luck (these need to be played on a computer, not a phone or tablet):

Biography Writing

For the first writing genre of the year (and to learn about their new classmates), third graders wrote biographies about each other. They went through all steps of the writing process, from planning to publishing:

The "Write Traits" we focused on for this piece of writing were organization and sentence fluency. Students learned how to use paragraphs and compound sentences.

The girls enjoyed learning about each other and sharing their work with classmates. 

Healthy Choices Wrap Up

Our new school counselor, Ms. Carnright, visited the 3rd grade classes for a lesson on how exercise affects the brain and how to deal with stress.

The third graders have started to plan their summative assessment, a presentation about Healthy Choices to the 2nd graders. Both classes will do their presentations on Wednesday, October 14th. 

Festival of Nations Wrap Up

Thanks to all of the parents and students who worked extra hard in various booths during the Festival of Nations. Here's a glimpse of the third graders running their game on the tennis courts:

The choir also did a great job on stage. Here are a couple of their songs (if we can find the other one, we'll add it to this post):

 

 

Investigating Exercise

We are investigating how exercise affects our bodies by trying different exercises on the Jungle Gym Playground.  To reach the "Going Further" level of the SOLO Taxonomy, students will need to create their own exercise plans.

Can you find exercises here that build strength and endurance? Which ones require balance or flexibility?

Peace Day Video

Seisen fifth graders planned an afternoon of activities for "Peace Day" on Tuesday, September 22nd. Check out this quick video to see some things the third graders did:

Parent Day

It was wonderful to meet you all in 3A!

Food Classification

Students kicked off the Healthy Choices unit by sorting food into groups.