Today was a big day for 3rd grade! The crayfish arrived!!! It was also National Dot Day! We read The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds and created our own dot paintings. We also met with our book buddies to help teach them to read. We even shared dot candy with our buddies. These little engineers had to modify a seed to make it move away from the parent plant in one of the following ways: gliding, falling, floating on water, sticking to an animal, or attracting animals to eat it and carry it away. They realized the importance of planning, designing, creating, and testing their products. All were successful and learned a lot! For the past week, we’ve been practicing addition strategies by solving 2, 3, and 4 digit addition problems efficiently. Today, we starting brainstorming subtraction strategies. Our bean plants keep growing and growing!
What a fun surprise!!! Aidan’s mom, Heather, made teacakes for our class to taste since our focus book is Saturdays and Teacakes. They were delicious!!! Now we can all say that we’ve eaten teacakes (and love them)!
Check out our class sprouter! We are growing bush beans, corn, peas, and sunflowers. Here are the kids’ mini sprouters. We are studying the effects that water has on seeds. So far, the seeds have double in size and are beginning to sprout. Bella and Geico are enjoying their lunch...meal worms! In Math, we are learning to round to the nearest ten and to the nearest hundred. We’re practicing these skills using games and IXL activities. The kids also enjoy playing “Close to 100” and “Capture 5.”
I was so focused on making sure the kids were comfortable with the class pets that I only got pictures of the kids who signed up to hold them. Everyone had fun playing on their chrome books, building with magnetic blocks, drawing, etc.
Even Dr. Richardson needs to take a brain break and relax in the Hard Work Cafe! We sure are blessed to have a principal who knows all the students by name and takes the time to get to know them.
It amazes me how much power words have and the emotions they can evoke! Our class loved listening to Stone Fox and begged me to keep reading it. Even though this was my 3rd time reading this book, I cried (full out ugly cry) along with a few other friends. It was a great time of bonding and learning to be sensitive to each other’s experiences and emotions.
This week, we’ve been talking about how important place value is in real-life situations. We’ve also been learning games to help us understand the values of numbers. Today, we built numbers up to 1000 using base 10 blocks. We also built numbers using food to symbolize base 10 blocks (crackers = hundreds, pretzels = tens, marshmallows = ones). I gave the kids a challenge to see which group could create the tallest tower using only marshmallows and spaghetti. It was really neat to observe how they planned, worked together, and then altered their designs to make the tallest tower. It was not so “neat” trying to clean up all of the squished marshmallows and broken spaghetti off of the tables and floor. The girls won the challenge! Their tower was 25 inches tall and could stand alone! This group of boys came in 2nd place with a 24 inch tower that could stand alone! So close! This group took a while to figure out a plan but they came up with a great design! These little problem solvers played math games and solved puzzles today! They also showed that they have great reading stamina as they read independently for 25 minutes without making a sound! |
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May 2019
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