Weekly Update: September 4-7

We packed a lot of learning into this short 4 day week!

In math, we wrapped up our data and graphs unit. The students enjoyed creating a class dot plot that displays the distance each of them can long jump, as well as making individual bar graphs with an online tool. On Friday, we took a drive on the Rounding Highway to learn about rounding numbers...ask your kids about it this weekend...they thought it was pretty funny!

Blurry pics of long jumps!

Taking a drive on the Rounding Highway!

In science, we are nearing the end of our unit on matter and have been continuing to learn about properties of matter. We experimented with buoyancy by building foil boats. The challenge for students was to design a boat that would hold 40 pennies. Only one of our groups was able to do that, but they all learned a great deal from the process.

In language arts, our reading testing continues and I am enjoying reading with each student one-on-one and getting to know their strengths and areas of growth we need to work on. Students are working on a personal narrative about a special moment in their life, as well as learning lots of strategies that good readers use when they read independently. We ended the week with a lesson from our librarian about Bluebonnet Books, and she challenged each third grader to read at least 5 Bluebonnet Books this year so they can participate in the voting parting in January. Ask your child what his/her personal goal is for Bluebonnet Books, and please encourage them to do lots of reading at home!

Weekly Update: August 27-31

This week in language arts, we have continued brainstorming ideas to write about for our first personal narratives. We have talked about how big "watermelon" ideas need to be narrowed down to tiny "seed" ideas. For example, I would not write all about my best friend Amy. Instead, I would write about the moment we first met in our college dorm. We are also continuing to build stamina while reading for longer periods of time and practicing skills such as visualizing and checking in with ourselves on comprehension while we read.

We are continuing our unit on data and graphs in math and have created several examples of bar graphs, pictographs and dot plots using different sets of data that we collected. Ask your child about our raisin dot plot from Friday!

In science, we are exploring matter and how matter can be described by its physical properties. On Thursday, students logged onto Stemscopes for the first time, which is an online interactive curriculum we will use throughout the year for each of our science units. On Friday, we did some hands on exploration of matter at stations involving magnetism, buoyancy, mass and temperature.

Students enjoyed our first E-SLOT activity this Friday. After leaning about the design process, they were challenged to design and build the tallest beanstalk they could with a partner, using only 10 pipe cleaners. Our tallest beanstalk was 20 inches tall!

It was another great week in third grade, and I hope everyone enjoys their three day weekend!