We have an exciting and busy week ahead for 3G! As a reminder, Wednesday (2/14) is Valentine's Day! Please reference my past email for any questions about a valentines exchange. Here are our learning updates for the week:
Math After measuring perimeter, we moved onto finding the area of rectangles and squares. Students made connections between finding the area to solving our array cards from the beginning of the year! We are still working on discussing the difference between area and perimeter, making sure not to mix the two up! We are moving onto constructing different shapes with our fancy new Straw Kits! Ask your child how they use a straw kit to construct a triangle, and what three rules all triangles have! We are moving onto quadrilaterals next! Writing Our Writer's Celebration is this Tuesday (2/13) at 8:30am-9:00am in the Cafe. We are looking forward to celebrating the hard work that 3G has put into their information pieces! Reading The class did a great job on their book talk small group presentations last week! I offered students the opportunity to do their book talks for the whole class starting last Friday and we will continue this week for the students who are interested. The audience will continue filling out a 3-2-1 for the presenters! 3- compliments for my classmates 2- questions I am wondering about 1- new book I want to try (at least) Science We have had so much fun this past week doing an Engineering Challenge! Students were partnered up and given a bag of materials. With just the bag of materials, tape, and index cards, students were asked to construct carts that go from "here to there." We then measured the distance our carts traveled after we released them down ramps! We will continue working on how to make our carts do tricks with magnets and paperclips!
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Math
We started a new Measurement unit this past week! We began by talking about two measurement systems; the U.S Standard and Metric. Students then started an investigation that involved exploring the classroom to measure different lengths in units of their choice! Some measuring tools that have been a focus are rulers, yardsticks, and meter sticks. We are now working towards measuring perimeter! Writing The class has been hard at work to finish their first drafts of their information books, and we have moved on to publishing! We are going to start thinking about hosting another Writer's Celebration. Stay tuned for the announcement! Reading This week students started reading their own independent Realistic Fiction books. On Wednesday, students should have their books completed as well as their story map filled out. Then we will begin constructing our book talks and visual representations! It is going to be a fun week in Reading! Science We had so much fun this past week continuing our unit on Motion and Matter! We created twirly birds and had a blast test running them in the classroom to observe their motion. Ask your child to talk to you about what a standard twirly bird looks like, and how we can change a variable to change the motion of the bird! We also had the opportunity to make tops and explore their motion with different designs. I wonder what motion we will study next?! *Reminder* Books and story maps need to be completed by this Wednesday 1/31. Also coming up this week: Community Celebration on Friday 2/2 with the theme PATRIOTS! Math
We have been focusing on problems that ask students to find the difference between two numbers. We practiced this by playing a new game called How Far From 100? Where students find the difference between 2 and 3 digit numbers and 100. We are using 100 as a landmark number within our solving. A popular tool that the class has been using to solve is a number line! Writing Students have been hard at work on their information writing pieces! We have been working on adding strong introductions, transition words, paragraphs and text features to excite our readers! Students have had opportunities to use books and iPads to research on their topics to add evidence to their writing. Reading We started realistic fiction reading groups! Students have been working on reading an assigned text. Our discussions around the texts have focused on identifying character traits and feelings based on the actions and words in a text. With this being a new addition to our learning, we have made sure to include extra time to read self-selected books! Science We started a new unit this week about motion and matter. We explored with magnets and talked about how magnets repel, attract and have a magnetic force. We also discussed balanced and unbalanced forces. We did a fun Science Magic experiment and created a "floating paper clip" ask your child to tell you about it. If you have a magnet, paper clip and some string, they may even be able to demonstrate! We have a great week full of learning ahead of us! I cannot believe that Winter Break is just around the corner! The 3G Bees have been hard at work and are looking forward to one more week of learning before a well deserved break is here. Here are some recent learning updates:
Math We have begun a new unit focusing back on addition/subtraction strategies all while keeping in mind place value. Something new we have been focusing on is rounding numbers to the nearest 10 and nearest 100. We have been doing a chant to remember our rounding rules! Ask your child to chant it for you! "5 and above, give it a shove! 4 and below, down you go!" Writing We are hard at work on our Information Books and have been doing a lot of work on transition words and leads for our writing! We talked about different lead types and even used some mentor texts to see how authors are grabbing their reader's attention! Reading We have finished our first Realistic Fiction book; Amber Brown is Not a Crayon. We practiced working on our comprehension by logging responses to questions into our reading journals! We are looking forward to starting our next class book. Social Studies Our seasonal murals are done! If you have not had the opportunity, please come check them out right outside of our classroom. We are finishing up our Wampanoag unit and are getting reading to start a new science unit when we return from break! This week we are looking forward to having the families who volunteered come in and teach about their holiday traditions!! If you did not sign up and are interested, please email me. Let's have a great last week before we return in 2018! Best, Ms. Gera Math
We have started up a new unit taking a break from Multiplication and Division and moving back to Addition and Subtraction within larger numbers. We have learned a new game, Capture 5 and we will be continuing to practice our strategies for solving. Keep your eyes peeled for the online link for Capture 5- it will be uploaded to the Math Links section soon. Writing We started a new writing unit, Information Writing! Students choose a topic that they felt they were an expert on, began planning out their ideas using different organizational strategies. Some favorites were; breaking our topics into smaller parts, cause and effect, problem and solution, and pros and cons. Our Writer's Notebooks are starting to fill up with all of our ideas! On Monday, we will begin our drafting process. Reading We have had quite a busy week with starting some new units! We started our Realistic Fiction unit this past week. As a class, we are reading the book Amber Brown is Not a Crayon by Paula Danziger. We have started to look at important elements in the story using a story map to organize our findings. Social Studies Students began researching their assigned seasons for the Wampanoag Mural Project. We will be taking the next few days to plan out our murals, draw sketches, and write labels and captions. We are looking forward to our paint day on Thursday! Thank you in advance to the parents who signed up to donate materials and volunteer! *Just a quick reminder- Tuesday 12/5 is an early release day for conferences! Dismissal will be at 11:15am.* Math
We have been working on collecting data in our classroom and have moved on to collecting data around the school! Groups went and visited classrooms around the school asking the question, "where do you like to play?" We then organized and categorized the data. We are moving onto measuring now, taking measurements of our feet, classroom length and how far we can jump. Writing We are looking forward to our Writer's Celebration on Monday morning at 8:30am in the cafe! Third graders have been working so hard to publish their narrative stories and should be very proud of all their hard work. This is definitely something to celebrate! Reading We have continued exploring the meaning of "theme" and "home" using the book Amazing Grace and Going Home. Schoolwide, classrooms are reading the book Lovely by Jess Hong and working on celebrating our differences. The main theme or messages the text shows is to respect others differences, and that everyone is lovely in their own way. We even cracked open a brown egg and a white egg to talk about outer appearances and inner appearances. Social Studies We started studying the Wampanoag this week. We made a KWL (know, want to know, learned) chart after reading a read aloud all about the Wampanoag to get students thinking and activate background knowledge. We have jumped into learning about seasonal life for the Wampanoag and even sketch noted to record important information and details! Reminder: Wednesday is an early release at 12:00pm-- no lunch will be served! Math
We have wrapped up our first unit on multiplication and have started a new unit on data and graphs! We have been collecting data from our class about our favorite places to eat, play, visit, etc and have been organizing and categorizing this data to answer questions about our class. Reading We dove into our new unit learning about the theme "home." We have been looking closely at the text Let's Go Home by Cynthia Rylant. Students are finding meaning in this text looking for the big ideas within each room that Rylant takes us through in the text. Writing 3G is becoming experts in punctuating dialogue! We have been hard at work on our narrative stories and have been going back to punctuate any dialogue we have included. Next, we will be focusing on adding endings to our writing and move on to the editing phase. Science This week we learned what happens to a lima bean seed when it is soaked in water. We weighed the seeds before adding water and after being soaked in water to determine how many grams of water the seeds soaked up. We also examined the inside of a lima bean seed and learned about the different parts of a seed (seed coat, cotyledons and embryo) and their functions. Math
We had a lot of fun this week exploring different related multiplication and division equations! Students created their own multiplication and division problems choosing a fact family to use and represented these problems in story form, an equation and a picture representation. We even created a few class books filled with entries!! Ask your child to tell you what their entries were about, we got creative in 3G! Reading We are just wrapping up learning about finding evidence and meaning within texts and how to ask ourselves questions as we read about the characters and the plot or setting of a story. We are starting to dive into our new unit around the idea of theme and the meaning of "Home." Writing We have been working hard on our new small moment story ideas! The class all became "job captains" of their own writing. I have seen so much determination and grit from our third grade writers. I am so proud to see them think about leads, dialogue, and the importance of the heart of their story as they draft independently! Science We have started a new unit on on plant and animal life structures! We are kicking off this unit by discussing the word property! This is review from second grade. We had the opportunity to look at green beans and count the seeds inside them. We even plotted our findings on a graph! This week we will be comparing seeds from different fruits- thank you for the donations!! Let's have another great week :) Reading
Last week we practiced figuring out meaning in different types of literature. We had fun with exploring the lyrics to the song "Firework" by Katy Perry. We practiced our highlighting skills and shared out new findings. This week, we will be exploring and practicing using context clues to figure out the meaning of a word. Writing We have been hard at work on our small moment stories! Everyone has chosen a true small moment that has happened in their lives, and have started drafting this moment into a story! We have started using draft books to write fast and furious, while learning to go back and add details and check for revision. Math We have been exploring with arrays and dimensions! We have started playing array games to practice our multiplication fact fluency. Arrays are a great visual for students who are learning their multiplication facts! The class has now learned TWO games that they can practice at home. You can find the links to these games in the "math links" section of my website! Social Studies We have concluded our train tour of Massachusetts! We passed through many important parts of MA, and even explored some landmarks! After creating maps to match our train tour destinations, we are now focusing in on Arlington. We have started discussing the landmarks that surround us in Arlington. Students will become reporters this week! They will be assigned a landmark and study this landmark in school, and report out to the class their findings. Buzz-worthy news has been soaring through 3G! Let's have another great week in Third! Ms. Gera
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