Friday, December 23, 2016

Weekly Update

Thank you for sharing your wonderful children with us each day!  We truly have a great group of students this year!!  Thanks again so much for the Target gift cards!  We appreciate your thoughtfulness and generosity!  Enjoy the holidays!  See you in the New Year!




Holiday Party
Click on the link below to check out pictures from our super fun class holiday party!  Thanks again to Mrs. Hegdal for planning the party and to ALL parents who donated items and/or their time to help out!  Thanks to Mrs. Diebol for all of the great pictures!
https://goo.gl/photos/R6T6e7bvuaLuJavK8

Science
We have started our Light and Heat Unit.  Students have identified sources of light and learned that light travels in a straight path.  We also talked about shadows and practiced making our own shadow puppets.








Monday, December 19, 2016

Weekly Update

All-Star of the Week

Aastha had a great week as our All-Star!  She brought in many fun items to share with the class including an origami mouse she made, trophy from Indian dance, hand carved wood puzzle from India and several cute pictures from her childhood.  She also read several entertaining poems from Jack Prelutsky's, "I'm Glad I'm Me" book of poetry. 

Social Studies

Students recently finished up our tour of the Northeast Region.  We had many educational stops where we learned about America's history and how the United States got started, and some other stops that taught fun things such as mass producing chocolate candy.  Students are filling out a travel journal during our adventures and will create a scrapbook from all of our stops throughout the year. 



 

Math

Students continue to explore clocks and measurement in Unit 3.  This week students focused on telling time to the quarter hour, half hour, five minute and one minute marks.  Students worked to use language such as 'quarter past', 'quarter to' and 'half past'.  Students are working to write the time as minutes after the hour and minutes until the next hour.  Realizing that there are 60 minutes in an hour helped students subtract to find how many minutes there were until the next hour.  Students also solve for elapsed time using subtraction, number lines and clocks to help.

Reading

Students continue to learn more about non-fiction text by exploring different structures of writing in the books they are reading.  Similar to our current writing unit, students are studying an authors work to understand if it is written in sequential order or as descriptive text.  They are also working to understand the cause and effect relationship while working with partners.



More Gingerbread Houses

Now that we are professionals in the gingerbread house building and decorating, we were asked to assist the kindergarten students as they create their masterpieces.  Third graders partnered with kindergarten buddies in Mrs. Hartley's class.





Monday, December 12, 2016

Weekly Update

All-Star of the Week
Will was our Amazing All-Star last week.  He had the entire class laughing as he shared his family pictures.  We especially enjoyed the pictures of him playing dress up and falling off the porch in a family picture.  Will also shared a very special photo album from his 7th year, a Lions jersey from his flag football team, and a blanket with a bear he had since he was a baby.  Will enjoyed a fun lunch with his mom and dad, read aloud his favorite book, and received many nice compliments from his classmates as well.




Math Workshop
We are continuing to work through Unit 3, learning about measurement.  Students took the first unit quiz and did very well.  Last week we focused on choosing the best unit of measurement to measure various items.  Students also practiced solving word problems.  It was very important to pay attention to the key words in the word problems as all four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) were mixed on a page.

Writing Workshop
Students have been working on their informational draft booklets.  First students picked a topic they consider themselves to be an expert on.  Then they created a table of contents and subtopic webs for each of their four chapters.  They also learned to organize some subtopic webs in sequential order if their chapter needs to be written in a certain order.




Reading Workshop
We continued to read informational text and reviewed the following strategies: readers preview, predict, and tap prior knowledge before reading; readers pause and paraphrase information in their own words; readers locate the main idea and key details from the text.  We also discussed how to determine the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary words.  Partners practiced finding unfamiliar vocabulary words and determining the meaning of the words by finding the definition in the same sentence, finding the definition in another sentence, using context clues, looking in the glossary, or asking someone.  Students also learned there are different types of informational text.  At the end of the week we introduced description and sequential text.




Gingerbread House Workshop
Students had a lot of fun building and decorating their gingerbread houses!  Thanks so much to all of the parent volunteers who came in to help out and who donated items.  We appreciate you!  Check out all of the fantastic looking houses below.  There was also an article in School Life Troy titled "The Best Part About Making Gingerbread Houses...is eating them as you go!"