Weekly Update

Research Workshop:

Students spent the entire week finishing up their notes on the 6 different topics they chose to research for their country report.  They used the sticky notes they had previously inserted into their country books to locate information.  Lessons were taught about paraphrasing (not copying exactly) the information in the text, but this is certainly a difficult concept for 3rd graders who are embarking on their first major research project.  At the end of the week, students began writing topic sentences for the paragraphs they will compose this week using the fact fragments in their notes.

Math:
We began Unit 4 this week: Multi-Digit Addition and Subtraction.  The first lessons focused on place value review.  Students worked on building numbers with their "Secret Code" cards.  (See picture below) and solving word problems with place value.  Next week we will practice rounding numbers to the nearest 10 and nearest 100.

Here is a look at the "Secret Code" cards and how we used them in class.

Social Studies:
We made some exciting stops this week on our Southeast Region Tour!  We jumped aboard a riverboat and traveled down the Mississippi River to visit Memphis TN.  We then chugged out to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico before heading to New Orleans, Louisiana.  In New Orleans, we learned about Hurricane Katrina and had a mini Mardi Gras celebration.

All aboard the Natchez Steamboat for our trip down the Mississippi!

Students wore beads and masks to take part in the festivities.

We listened to 4 different types of music famous in the south: Dixieland Jazz, the Memphis Blues, Cajun Music, and Kentucky Bluegrass.

As students listened to each type of music, we played, "Name that Musical Style."  They tried to hear the different instruments to determine the type of musical style.  

Cajun Music!!

Abby thinks she hears Cajun Music!

We made traditional King Cakes for our celebration!

Nanthana, Emma, Alex, and Allison helped frost the King Cakes.

Purple, yellow, and green sprinkles were added, the official colors of Mardi Gras.

Time to eat!

Jack is ready to eat!

Alina and Abigail were the lucky students who found a prize in their piece of king cake.  They will have good luck all year!!

Alex was especially excited about this tour stop because her parents lived in New Orleans!

Grace writes a travel journal to tell what she learned during the tour stop.

All-Star of the Week:
Nanthana was our Star of the Week!  We loved seeing her photos and listening to her read aloud her favorite book, Wise Up, Silly Owl.  Her parents created a very special book with heartfelt poems about Nanthana.  The class loved hearing them read aloud.  Below is a photo of Nanthana with her lunch buddies!

Weekly Update

As a teacher, it is moments like the picture below that melt my heart.  Devon and Zain listened intently to Orlando read aloud about spiders from a magazine.  It's so fun to be in the middle of our nonfiction unit.  Students' minds are like sponges, and they love to learn all of the interesting facts and details they are reading about!

Research Workshop
Students continued their country research this week.  They began taking notes on each of their subtopic webs.  Each day they are learning a new strategy for taking notes.  We focused on taking notes as fact fragments versus writing complete sentences.  This has proven to be a bit tricky for students, but we will continue working on it.  We also discussed the difference between an important fact versus an interesting detail.  Although interesting details can be facts as well, we want students to only take notes on the most important facts about their subtopics.  Students learned they can use text features, such as captions, to take notes as well.  Soon all of their hard work taking notes will be turned into complete thoughts as they write paragraphs about each topic.

Math Workshop
We wrapped up Unit 3 this week.  The unit test covered the various skills which were taught throughout the unit, including: reading and creating a bar graph, telling time, measurement, and elapsed time.  The test will go home on Monday.  Please take some time to go over the test with your child and work on correcting any problems he/she may have missed.  Elapsed time word problems were by far the trickiest concept from this unit.  We hope to revisit this skill again this year.  If you notice your child is struggling with it a bit, please work on it at home as well.  

Science
We also finished up our Light & Heat unit.  Students learned many new concepts from this unit through different investigations in class.  Your child should be able to give you a few examples of light sources and tell you light travels in a straight path.  He/she should also understand light bends, or refracts, when it travels from air to water.  During one of our last investigations, students discovered ice melts faster in your hands versus a plastic cup because your hands provide heat energy.  We will begin our next science unit this week.

All-Star of the Week
Students wrote the nicest compliments to Emma on Friday!  They loved the items from her sharing sack and her read aloud, Duck! Rabbit!  We're still wondering if it was a duck or a rabbit...cute story!  Emma also enjoyed two very special letters from her mom and dad!  Below is a picture of our All-Star with her lunch buddies; her mom and grandma brought her sushi!

Weekly Update

 Research Workshop:
We started country research this week, so we are now combining reading and writing workshop into research workshop.  We will do research workshop 2 times during the school day.  Students were so excited to pick their countries and get the library books they will be using for their research!  They created webs to determine the 6 main topics they want to research about their country.  Sample topics included food, clothing, housing, holidays and festivals, school, animals, etc.  Using the table of contents and the index in their books, students placed sticky notes on the pages in their books that included information about their topics.  This task was in preparation for the notes they will begin taking this week.

Math Workshop:
We began the week doing more lessons on elapsed time number stories.  This is a challenging concept for students, so we have been spending extra time doing these types of problems together in class.  Students also began lessons on graphing.  They studied bar graphs and pictographs to interpret information and answer story problems using the graphs.

Social Studies:
We are currently on a region tour of the Southeast that we began right after winter break.  We started our journey in Florida with tour stops at Everglades National Park, JFK Space Center, Disney World, and we are now in Jamestown, VA.

We started our tour on a fishing trawler!

We headed to the Florida Everglades and took an airboat ride to see the many birds and animals.

Our tables were our pretend boats!

We had a "Disney Day" in Orlando, Florida!

Students brought in Disney souvenirs and displayed them on their desks.

Students walked around our "Disney Museum" to check out each other's souvenirs.

Emma gets her sailor cap back on to travel to the JFK Space Center!

Students write travel journals after visiting each tour stop.

Weekly Update

Reading Workhosp:
We began our Informational Unit.  Students reviewed the following nonfiction text features: table of contents, photograph, caption, index, glossary, heading, and subheading.  We spent time locating these text features in various informational texts and discussing the purpose of each one.  Students also learned how to infer unfamiliar words within informational texts.  They practiced inferring unfamiliar words using sentence clues and by reading ahead.  Students also listened to a read aloud of a biography about Martin Luther King, Jr and learned how to complete a timeline.  Then they were assigned a picture book biography of their own and completed a timeline.

Math Workshop:
The second half of our measurement unit has focused on telling time.  We have learned to tell time to the minute and 5 minute interval.  Students have also practiced solving several elapsed time word problems.  The elapsed time word problems are tricky for many students.  We will continue to practice elapsed time in class.

Science:
Students enjoyed visiting the Michigan Science Center.  Our field trip started with a show called "What's Up?" in the Planetarium.  We also caught a show in the DTE Sparks Theater where Allison had a "hair raising" experience and Devon became a Jedi for a moment.  In the Toyota 4D Theater we went for a "ride" and got a little wet as we learned more about engineers.  We also learned more about the states of matter during a hands-on experiment with "pink slime."  Students also had a lot of time to explore the many exhibits throughout the center.



All-Star of the Week:
Stephanie was our All-Star this week.  She shared her favorite book, Goodnight Moon, and several photos with the class.  She also enjoyed a special lunch from Subway with her mom on Friday.  Students wrote many nice things about Stephanie in her compliment card booklet.

 

Happy Holidays!

We wish all of our all-star students & families a happy and healthy holiday break!

Check out the slideshow below from our class holiday party!  Remember, you can double click on the slideshow to view photos individually or click HERE to see the album and download your favorite photos.

Weekly Update

Let it Snow!

Reading Workshop
We continued our mystery unit in class.  Each detective club is nearing the end of its chapter book.  The conversations have been pretty exciting!  Students have taken a lot of good reading detective notes and have come up with a list of suspects.  It will be fun to find out how the mysteries end.  We focused on specific character traits of the characters in our books and practiced providing evidence from the book to support our thinking.  We also learned more about a red herring (clue which throws the detective off track) and discussed possible red herrings in our books.

Writing Workshop
Students have been working on their personal essays.  They began with an opinion statement, such as "I think people should reach to do the impossible."  Next, students worked on writing an introduction.  They also worked on beginning to write two, focused short stories which support their opinion statement.  We hope to finish the essays up in class this week.

Gingerbread Workshop
The class had a lot of fun building and decorating gingerbread houses!  Thank you so much to everyone for donating our needed supplies!  Thanks also to all of the parent volunteers for helping our class build and decorate!  We couldn't have done it without you!!

Science
Students continued to learn more about light from a few explorations in class.  We discovered the difference between transparent, translucent, and opaque materials.  We also learned that light bends when it passes from one material to another.

Weekly Update

Reading Workshop
The students are loving our mystery unit!  Each student has a detective case file in which they keep track of important clues, determine possible suspects, and provide evidence from the book to support their suspicions.  Last week they began meeting with their detective clubs to discuss their assigned mysteries.  Students are learning conversation prompts that encourage them to agree/disagree with others, build on each other's ideas, and ask questions of their groups members to clarify their thinking.

A detective club gets ready to discuss their mystery.

Each student has a case file in which they keep their book and keep track of clues and suspects.

Detective Zaits at work!

Brock, Calin, and Orlando are finding some suspicious happenings in their A-Z Mystery!

Writing Workshop
We started a new unit this week, Personal Essay.  Students began the week reading personal essays written by adults and kids.  They learned that personal essays are often focused on a "big idea" and include a message that is learned through a personal life experience.  After determining the "big ideas" in the essays they read, students developed their own idea list for the personal essays they will begin to write.

Math
Students finished up Unit 2 in math last week and took the final test on Friday.  This unit really required students to read story problems carefully and choose the mathematical operation that would make the most sense.  The unit focused mostly on multiplication and division, but there was also some addition and subtraction mixed in some of the story problems.  You will find the corrected test in your child's homework folder this week.  We will now begin Unit 3: Measurement, Time, and Graphs.

Social Studies
We finished our train tour of the Northeast region last week.  What a great trip we had!  Students especially enjoyed our last stops in New York City and Washington D.C.  We pretended to climb to the top of the Empire State Building in NYC and "visited" many monuments and memorials in Washington D.C.  At the end of the tour, students glued all of the souvenirs they collected into their region binders to create scrapbook pages.

We are patriotic on the train to Washington D.C.!

Nanthana writes a travel journal in her region binder after each tour stop.

All-Star of the Week
Jordan was our all-star last week!  He had a fantastic time sharing items from his sharing sack and showing the class his fun photos from his family trip to Kalahari.  Perhaps his favorite day of the week was Wednesday when his mom made a PowerPoint slide show in which she told the class lots of things we didn't know about Jordan.  He also enjoyed a special lunch with grandpa on Thursday.  It was especially fun to hear his Minecraft parody!