Week in Review: January 9-13

This has been a busy, full 5 day week for sure! In language arts, students took the district wide assessments over biographies, as well as expository writing. We also continued working on our PBL articles and most students are done, or nearly done, with their final draft. Students worked all week in small book clubs reading a biography of their choice, and then completing a project about the subject of their biography. We also finished up our One Little Word paragraphs and got those posted in the common area.

In math, we had a full class this week, as our TAG math students stayed in the room all week because the TAG teachers were doing testing. We've been working on area all week, and how to apply it to problem solving.

Finding the area of various shapes 

We finished up our unit on land changes in science with a landslide investigation on Monday and a test on Tuesday. Students really enjoyed this unit! We have now moved onto studying soil. We have been putting the soil samples you all sent in to good use, as we explore what makes up soil and how it is composed of layers.

Making landslide models

Learning new vocab

Studying soil samples 

Observing layers of soil

In social studies, we are learning about Martin Luther King, Jr. in honor of the upcoming holiday. Remember, there is no school for students (or teachers, yay!) on Monday. Have a wonderful three day weekend!

Week in Review: January 2 - 6

We've had a great first week of 2017! In science, we built volcanoes outside and watched them erupt to see how the earth changes after an eruption. We also worked with Mrs. Swyers class to build a model of an earthquake and learned that not all earthquakes are created equal. Some can be much more destructive than others. We learned about landslides on Friday through an informative video, and on Monday, we will create our own landslide models. This will wrap up the unit on earth's changes and we will have a unit assessment on Tuesday.

In math, we spent the first day back working on slide shows demonstrating knowledge of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional shapes. You can see the students' work in the post just below this one! We then moved on to area and have spent lots of time exploring this hands on, using color tiles, base ten blocks, and rulers. We will continue with area into next week.

In language arts, we are learning about the lives of others through biographies. Next week, students will participate in a biography book group as they choose one historical figure to focus on. Our writing this week has been focused on goal setting for the new year. Students wrote letters to themselves about what they hope to accomplish by the end of third grade, and then we each chose one word on which to focus our year. They chose words like discover, dream, try, positive and focus, and then wrote a paragraph about what that word means to them.  Next time you are at the school, check out our bulletin board outside the classroom with their paragraphs!

Geometry Scavenger Hunt Slide Shows

Below are my math student's slide shows about 2D and 3D shapes. They learned a lot about geometry through this project!