We look forward to our dessert social this Thursday night. An email should have come home last week. The third grade parents are being asked to contribute desserts. We will meet and greet in the dining room from 6:30-7:15. Hope to see you there.
This week we finished working on our Someday projects and started learning about different genres of books. The students will be encouraged to read books in several different genres throughout the year and we will set up challenges on Biblionasium to help them stay focused on that goal.
We also began to collect Words We Love. This is a year long activity that aims to expose students to new vocabulary words in a way that is fun and meaningful. Research shows that in order to add a new word to your vocabulary you must hear and use it at least 40 times! We collect words that we love during read aloud time as well as in our other subjects. This week we collected the words drab, wilted, tedious, and efficient. We post the words in the classroom and practice using them in a sentences that show the meaning. Then whenever someone hears someone else using the word correctly they say, "ding, ding" and a tally mark goes up on the Words We Love chart! You should have heard how many times efficient was thrown around during math yesterday!
In math we went on a measurement hunt around the room to practice measuring accurately in centimeters. The students also held a math forum where students shared their strategies and other mathematicians asked questions and clarifying comments about the strategies and thinking. We are beginning to move towards more efficient strategies for combining double and triple digit numbers as well as adding multiple numbers at a time. Some of these include combining numbers by place value and finding friendly numbers to "jump" to on a number line. Some students might be ready for the standard algorithm or "carrying" method, but what we usually find is that most make careless errors and when asked to explain their thinking they are not sure why the carrying happened. We want to make sure that they have a solid conceptual understanding before moving on to quick strategies.
We look forward to starting our new Weather and Climate unit next week as well as a punctuation study in literacy.
Our fall conferences are coming up and this is a great time to talk about academic and social goals for you students this year. You can sign up on the sidebar under 'Important Dates'. Please let me know if you have any trouble and we can help you to navigate the wiki or put you in a time slot ourselves. We can also can be available some mornings at 7:15 if that works better with your schedule.
If you would like to sign up to volunteer to do a Friday Workshop at some point. The sign up is under Important Dates also. This is a time to work with a small group on a craft, game, sport, or other activity. The workshops run from 2:00-2:40 most Fridays throughout the year.
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