Weekly Update

All-Star of the Week:

Adrien was our all star last week.  He started the week off with a special lunch.  He also shared photos of his family and him.  The students were amazed at all of the places Adrien has visited.  He brought in some unique souvenirs from Africa and a medal that he received--his peers were mesmerized by his sharing sack!

Mrs. Hartley's Kindergarten Class

We are buddies with Mrs. Hartley's kindergarten class.  On Tuesday, your third grader was paired up with a kindergarten student and together they built mini gingerbread houses out of milk cartons and graham crackers.  In the photos below, you'll see the partnerships working together---they LOVED being the mentor and helping their little learner out!

Reading Workshop:

Last week we reviewed the various text structures---

Descriptive

Sequential

Cause and Effect

Comparison

The students were expected to later in the week, identify the text structure in a book of their choice and apply an appropriate graphic organizer with important information from the text to better comprehend what they were reading.

Writing Workshop:

We have been working on our nonfiction draft booklets.  Last week the focus was on writing add-on sentences after the topic sentence of each paragraph.  Next, they learned how to use topic specific vocabulary in their paragraphs.  Once they determined those topic-specific vocabulary words, they learned how to make a definition box using those words just as the authors of our mentor texts did.

Math:

Time! Time! and More Time!

Students learned how to tell time by first, reading the time on the clock.  For example, the students might say that the time was 3:27.  We then determined how many minutes after and how many minutes before the next hour it is when telling time (27 min. after 3  or....33 minutes before 4:00).  We also looked at Elapsed Time problems in both a table format and in story problems.  The students then used a number line to help them add and subtract time.