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!