I cannot believe we only have 11 more days of school! This year in third grade has flown by! With it being the month of June, we have many special days and activities that are coming up. On Monday, we have 3-D Day! One more thing to keep in mind is that homework for the year is over!!
Other important dates: Monday, June 18th- Friday, June 22nd- Menotomy Long Ago Week! Friday, June 22nd- End of Year Celebration at 8:30am Friday, June 22nd- Field Trip to Newton! Monday, June 25th- Last day of school! 11:30am release, no lunch Math We have circled back to practicing our subtraction strategies! Some of the strategies we have been using are keeping one number whole and subtracting the other in parts, adding on up from the smaller number to the larger number, and changing the equations around to make it easier to solve (ex- 302-199 to 303-200). Writing We have been having a blast working through out Fairy Tales unit! We started off by reading some classic Fairy Tales and then adaptations. We had some great discussions about what changes authors made and how they were able to keep the feel of the classic story. Students then chose a Fairy Tale that they knew well, and made decisions about how they would adapt it. We are now drafting and moving onto publishing very soon! Reading Book clubs have taken off! I let students take the reigns for this mini unit, and each student has taken on 4 rotating jobs to complete before each book club meeting date. I have been so impressed at how well each group works together, the grit of each student to finish their assignment before their group meets, and how much each group is enjoying their self selected text! Science We have moved onto a Water and Climate unit to finish up the year! We started by looking at weather forecasts and discussed our own observations compared to documented forecasts online. We also started some fun investigations using water with one being the effects of water droplets on different surfaces. More to come this week!
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I hope everyone is enjoying the long weekend! 20 more days of third grade! Some learning updates from last week:
Math: We continued our work with addition and subtraction using different strategies to solve for numbers in the hundreds and thousands. I was so impressed to see students activating their prior knowledge and thinking about different strategies they could use to solve. We practiced adding by place value, and changing one number to add it in parts. We will be continuing this work in the week coming up! Writing: I am so pleased to say that we are published petition writers! I am so proud of the class for showing grit and pushing themselves to finish their petitions. They cannot wait to show you all and see if they can fill their pages with signatures supporting them! This week we will be starting our last mini writing unit of the year-- Fairy Tales! We will be studying some classics this week. Reading: We have wrapped up our integrated Reading and Social Studies unit on the American Revolution! To end the year on a fun note, we will be doing book clubs! Students were put into groups of 4-5, they had the opportunity to choose a book as a group, and will begin reading their books this week in class! Science: We said goodbye this week to our lovely class friends-- the crayfish. A big thank you again to all the families who have adopted our classroom crayfish! I know they are in good hands and hope you will enjoy them as much as your children did at Dallin! This past week we met up with our Reading Buddies TWICE! On Friday, we got together to read the book The Word Collector by Peter Reynolds and then discussed and brainstormed different words of kindness we could share to someone. We then went outside to decorate Dallin's hardtop and wall with kind words using chalk. It was so nice to see our third graders help the first grade buddies and work together to complete an amazing task!
Math: We used centers this week to practice addition and subtraction strategies for multi digit numbers. We then looked at how certain expressions can amount to the same answer (52 + 25 = 54 + 23). As a class we came up with a conjecture and then worked together to either test it out, prove how it worked, or find a way to show it didn't work. We are still working on this and I cannot wait to see what out third grade mathematicians come up with! Writing: It's editing and publishing time! Students worked hard last week to finish their petition drafts. Our goal for tomorrow is to start publishing and have pieces to go for the end of the week! Reading: We had a lot of fun this week with our integrated Social Studies unit. Primarily, we focused on the Boston Tea Party! After learning about the Boston Tea Party, students chose a perspective again to take. Either a Patriot, Loyalist, or a British Soldier. Then students used an eyeball outline to draw what their perspective would be seeing and feeling either before, during, or right after the Boston Tea Party. Our perspective taking is becoming so strong! Science: We have studied our crayfish's behaviors and adaptations and we will be observing them this week to see how they behave in their habitats. We did a STEM challenge on Friday on the Boston Tea Party! Students chose partners and received a bag of materials and a tub of water. Their goal was to use only the materials provided- to design a crate that could hold a tea bag, be placed in a tub of water, and keep the tea bag dry. It was so fun to watch students problem solve and work together all while having a time limit! Ask your child what they used for their crate, if they were successful, and what they would do different next time! Happy Mother's Day to all of the 3G moms! I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend and this special day.
Before I get into some learning updates, I wanted to say a big thank you to all our Dallin families for an amazing Teacher Appreciation Week! I felt extra appreciated this week because of all of you and your children. I was so touched by some of the cards I received on Friday, and was reminded of how our time together in third grade is quickly coming to an end! Thank you for everything!! The Third Grade has completed their first MCAS testing for the school year! Our class worked so hard on Wednesday and Friday this week during testing. We can all finally take a big breath knowing that testing is done! Math: On days that we were not testing, we learned about measurement using liquid volume and mass. We used graduated cylinders to measure in milliliters and filled up liter bottles to show the conversion from mL to L. Ask your child if they know how many mL = 1 L. We also used a pan balance to find out the mass of everyday objects in our classroom. We will be moving onto solving addition and subtraction problems using measurement later this week. Writing: We are continuing to work on our petitions! Students surveyed the class to collect data for their thesis topic. This week we will work on learning to add introductions and conclusions to our pieces to make them stronger! Reading: We continued this week with our integrated Social Studies unit on the American Revolution. The class has been learning about many events leading up to the war. This past week, we learned about the Stamp Act and even did a simulation as a class to understand the different perspectives and voices at that time! We are now learning about the Boston Massacre and students are creating their own pieces of propaganda to show either the Patriot's perspective or the Loyalist's perspective. I am excited for the class to keep working and see what they come up with! Science: Students learned the proper way to handle crayfish this past week! I invited our very own custodian, Mr. Campbell into the classroom to teach the class! Mr. Campbell grew up around crayfish and is an expert! We learned about crayfish adaptations and behaviors this week. Ask your child what a crayfish uses its pincers for? Or what happens when you reach for a crayfish? What do the crayfish do when you put a "house" in the habitat? This week we will have Math MCAS on Wednesday (5/9) and Friday (5/11). Due to the testing, we will not have homework this week. Our trip to the Jason Russell House last week was a blast! The class got to learn about life in Menotomy as well as one of the first events of the American Revolution! Thank you to the parents who chaperoned the field trip!!
Math: This past week we took some time to review math concepts from earlier in the year. We will continue to do so this week to gear up for MCAS! Students did such a great job activating prior knowledge. Some concepts we focused on were fractions, area, perimeter, polygons and rounding. Writing: Students worked on stating their thesis for a petition and moved onto thinking up three big reasons to support their topics. We are now working on different ways to generate evidence to support our reasons. Some strategies we discussed were using personal stories/connections, observations and examples. Reading: After learning about similes and metaphors we read the poem "What is Red?" which is a poem that makes a lot of comparisons of things to a color! Students then felt inspired and picked their own color to write a comparison about. There were a lot of descriptive and imaginative metaphors and similes included! We will be switching gears this week by doing our integrated Social Studies unit on the American Revolution during our Reading time. We will be zooming into the French and Indian War! Science: We began a Science unit studying crayfish!! Students have observed crayfish to learn about their structures and behavior. We even had a class discussion to determine the functions of these structures. The crayfish have been a big hit for students so far! I heard some students coming up with some creative names for them! :) We have an exciting week planned that ends with a trip to the Jason Russell House on Friday, May 4th! Please see below for some learning updates:
Homework- We will be sending home a reading response sheet instead of a reading log going forward for the rest of the year. We have practiced these in class and the fiction/nonfiction prompts that students can use went home and will always be posted under the "homework" tab on this site. Math: We have been doing a lot of work with comparing fractions in our class by using different means of representation! We have used number lines, brownies, drawings, and words to explain our reasoning for why when comparing fractions that one could be larger or the two could be equivalent! We will be moving into an MCAS review to prepare for our testing dates on May 9th and 11th. Writing: We have moved into the second part of our Opinion Writing Unit. We are writing petitions! Students chose topics that they were passionate about, keeping in mind that the goal of their petition is to convince their readers/listeners to join them and support them! We made booklets to help us track our writing progress and organize all our thoughts and ideas neatly. The next step will be to come up with three strong reasons to support students' thesis statements and be able to fill our booklets with examples and reasoning. Reading: We have been learning about many poetic devices the past few weeks and how they are used to show emotion in a poem. Just some of the new poetic devices we can add to our lists are; onomatopoeia, simile and metaphor! Social Studies: We had so much fun on our field trip to Plimoth Plantation last week! This week we be continuing our studies of the history of the United States by beginning to learn about the events that led up to the American Revolution. Our visit to the Jason Russell House this week is going to tie in nicely! One more school week until April Break! It's a busy one too! As a reminder, we have MCAS on Monday and Wednesday this week. Please make sure to pack your child a water bottle to have in the classroom! Students should also have a good book prepared to read for early finishers. Mints are allowed, but please be mindful of how much you are packing your child for one test session. If you have any questions at all, I'm only an email away!
In other news, the Dallin Spring Book Fair will be the week of April 23rd, when we get back from break. Our class will have in school purchasing time during our Library time that Wednesday. The book fair will be open everyday after school that week so you can purchase then as well. Math This past week we worked with learning ways to add fractions together to make one whole, and we also talked about different ways to represent one whole. After working with sharing brownies, we moved onto sharing cookies using pattern blocks to represent the unit fractions we were working with. We also used a number line to show an ant's distance when traveling by a fraction at a time (and stopping.. because ants get tired, of course!) We also measured our hand spans to the nearest fourth inch and plotted our data on a line plot! Students made some great connections remembering our unit on data and measurement from earlier in the year. Ask your child to show you how to measure your hand span with a ruler! Writing We are almost finished up with our speeches for our Opinion Unit! With MCAS this week and only three regular schedule school days.. we are using the time to publish and do some fun writing before starting a new opinion piece after vacation! Stay tuned! Reading This past week we started a Poetry Unit! Students got their own personal poetry journal to use each day. The journals are filled with poems and spaces for them to do their work each day. We have been focusing on poetic devices like; rhyme, rhythm, repetition, assonance, and alliteration. We even had a chance to write our own poems that resembled the structure of "Every Time I Climb a Tree" by David McCord. Ask your child what their "Every Time I..." statement was! Social Studies We started our Colonial/American Revolution Unit! We started with learning about the thirteen colonies; northern, middle and southern and discussing about what each was known for. We also did some research on colonial life; homes, school, children, food, jobs etc. This week we will be doing a Reader's Theater piece taking on the role as young children from this time, and learning about the perspective of these children. This unit has been a hit so far! Happy Easter and Passover to all families celebrating today! I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend!
As mentioned in my previous posts, we have been gearing up for the ELA MCAS. Third grade will be taking the ELA MCAS tests on Monday, April 9th and Wednesday, April 11th. Please let me know ASAP if you have any appointments or vacations scheduled for your child during this time. Keep reading below for some learning updates! Math We have switched gears into our sixth math unit of the year! We are now focusing on Fractions! We started off this unit by imagining large brownies big enough to share with different amounts of people. We reviewed the terms numerator and denominator, and added the term unit fraction to our vocabulary. We are starting to take things a step further and figuring out how we can add fractions together to make one whole. Writing The class has started flash drafting their speeches! We are planning on doing a few opinion pieces and a speech is the first one. Our goal is to continue writing with our audience in mind making sure our points are clear, that we have reasons to support our opinions, and lots of evidence to back them up! Reading We have continued our work on MCAS prep! We have been having so much fun connecting our MCAS strategies to Super Mario Bros! We introduced the "mushroom" as pre reading strategies; revving up your mind, using helpful hints in the text, noticing text features, and re-reading directions. The "fly trap" or "piranha plant" is for answering multiple choice questions; watching out for tricks, eliminating answers, going back to the text, and taking your time. The "tunnel" is for essay questions; making a plan before writing, going back into the text for help, We have been practicing these strategies together, with partners, and this week independently. We have also been doing a lot of work with main idea and key details. Ask your child if they know how a pizza can represent a main idea and key details! Fingers crossed we have a full week of school this week! As a reminder, our report card send home date has changed. Please look out for your child's report card this Wednesday (2/21).
Last Friday was "Students be the Teacher" Day! Even with two snow days and only one day to prepare, students blew me away! I was so impressed to see how passionate the class was about the topics they chose to teach and how they went about instructing for the class. The kids really stepped into my role even using the chime and cues to get students attention :) Here is a update on some of the new learning we have been doing in school: Math As I mentioned in my previous post, we have looped back to working on multiplication and division. After studying and exploring cube trains, we have moved onto practicing our multiplication facts up to 10x10 with games, word problems, and cards. The goal is for students to know their facts up to 10x10, so students should still be practicing at home! Writing Our Opinion unit is off to a great start! I have loved the discussions and sharing time we have had over the past two weeks. The class has been very passionate either about different problems and solutions they know and see, or about people they believe are noteworthy and why they should be acknowledged more often. We are still in the planning phase but will be underway with drafting soon! Reading Up next in Reading, we will be using time to focus on MCAS prep. As a third grade team we are introducing tips and strategies that students can use to help them as they are working through the ELA test. A theme we are using is Super Mario Bros, and how the game has some similarities to the test. Each day we will be introducing a new game character or symbol and relate it to a strategy or tip they can use during the testing period. Ask your child this week where they can look if they need a Super Mario Bros refuel! Social Studies We have been learning a lot about the Pilgrims- starting with why they left England, what their voyage was like on the Mayflower, what challenges they faced after arriving in America, and what life was like for children in that time period. We even had a fun and interactive look at what the ship looked like aboard! Students used the iPads to take a tour of the ship. Ask your child what they think is the most interesting thing they have learned so far in this unit! Math
We started our 5th unit of the year! We are circling back to multiplication and division and exploring with cube trains in patterns. We have been exploring 3 trains, 4 trains, and 6 trains and how we can use these trains to solve multiplication and division problems. Writing We started out Opinion Writing unit by first talking about how to write a persuasive speech. Student thought of problems and solutions and drafted speeches on various topics. We are moving onto discussing what a noteworthy person is, and how we can write speeches about people. We have been having great discussions with our writing partners to share out reasons to support our thesis and examples. Reading and Social Studies We have begun our integrated Pilgrim Unit in Reading and Social Studies. In Reading we have been discussing point of view and perspectives by looking at the text "Voices in the Park" by Anthony Browne. In Social Studies, we worked together to make a class chart about what we already know about the Pilgrims. We moved into discussing the two groups of people who voyaged over on the Mayflower; the Separatists (Saints) and the Strangers. Ask your child if they remember what each group's perspective and opinions were! |
News and Events!This will be updated based on monthly important dates, news and events!
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