Mrs. Watson's Weekly: January 2017

Today is DAY 90!
You know what that means! We are one half of the way through our third grade year!

We have been busy these past few weeks. We enjoyed having a student teacher. Miss Lacroix enjoyed her time in third grade.

We have been reading a variety of non-fiction texts. We started with Deadliest Animals. On the cover is a fierce lion and the first page shows us his sharp teeth and claws.

He does look deadly!

Wow... those teeth!

We were impressed and thought it indeed looked deadly. BUT... do you know what animal is the deadliest of them all?

Yup... here it is. The DEADLY mosquito.

That's right. The mosquito is the deadliest animal. Each year, 2 to 3 million people die from diseases transmitted by mosquitoes. Then we had a conversation about why the lion was on the cover. How SCARED would you be looking at the mosquito?

Our non-fiction journey continued with Dolphins. With this book, we really looked at the non-fiction text features that were included in the text. There was:

What did you see?

an index
charts
a glossary
bold print
colored text
diagrams
pictures
captions
text boxes

Finally, we read Titanic. We started off by sharing our schema (prior knowledge/what we already know). Then we predicted what we might find out or learn. We asked questions and then began to read!

In 1912, Titanic was the biggest ship ever built.
It was called a "floating palace".

The students LOVED this book.

Did you know...

the ship had four elevators, a heated swimming pool, a gym, 2 barber shops, and two libraries?
some passengers paid about $99,000 of today's money to travel aboard Titanic?
Titanic was as long as three football fields?
more than 1,500 passengers and crew died?

We are now starting to read books in small groups and using the same format of tracking our learning.

Using the FAB FOUR to help us learn!

Working on reading non-fiction is going along hand in hand with writing non-fiction. Students have started their informational writing in class. We started with our expert lists and then we brainstormed what we could say about our topics. We visited the library to search for resources to help us. We then wrote introductions about our topic.

We reviewed an example to get ideas of how to write our introductions. We also looked at 23 other non-fiction books
(1 per student) to see how each book started!

Students are now working on the chapters of their texts. Thank you for helping out with research at home. Having extra information on hand helps our writers KEEP on writing!

We are circling back to what we have seen the EXPERTS do and trying to add some of the text features we have seen into our own work!

Chapter work... with text features!

SCIENCE

So we are learning about forces and motion. We did some experiments with friction and some with gravity. Parachute Guy was fun! We learned about how things fall. Two pieces of paper fall differently depending of the shape of the paper. We learned about AIR FRICTION. We did several trial runs of Parachute Guy's descent. I'm sure some trials continued at home from various heights as well.

From the second floor or Wheelock School, Parachute Guy attempts his most daring jump yet...

We are now reading and learning about Sir Isaac Newton, the famous English scientist who is said to have "discovered" gravity.

We read about Sir Isaac Newton and highlighted what we thought we important details from the text. We charted those details on the board. BUT THEN, we went further and divided the details into to categories.. INTERESTING or IMPORTANT. We used our knowledge from Titanic to help us. Titanic had 2 barber shops! Interesting or important? Titanic did not have enough lifeboats for all the passengers since the builders wanted to allow space for first class passengers to stroll on the deck. Interesting or important? They could easily tell these apart. What about Sir Isaac Newton. He never married. Is that interesting or important? He developed a form of math called calculus. Interesting or important? We decided what we thought!

We will now start to learn about Sir Isaac Newton's three Laws of Motion. Stay tuned!

MATH

From area to graphing! We are working on reading, understanding, and making bar graphs and picture graphs. We spent time today talking about the difference between reading a graph and interpreting a graph. Take a look!

Reading a graph:
"Basketballs and jump rope have the same number."
Interpreting a graph:
"There are three times as many soccer balls as bats."

Interpreting a graph involves more thinking! And that is what we want our students to do!

We are also creating our own graphs.

For this journal problem, students had to use the given data to create a bar graph. The question asks them to graph the coins two brothers have in their piggy banks. They must include a title, a label for both the x and y axis, and a scale greater than one. And just when they thought they were done, I asked them to SOLVE and find out how much money the boys had!

And that's not all... we have also been learning about prefixes and suffixes, new words, elapsed time, main idea, author's purpose, cursive letters, possessive nouns....

Check back later... or be sure to follow us on TWITTER! #180daysofawesome

Happy New Year to everyone!

Room 102 is starting the year off with lots of learning! We came back on Tuesday and got right back to work. We wrote New Year's resolutions. What will it mean for 2017? Ask your child about his/her promises for the new year?

Catherine and Jaxon work on their lists.

Caroline writes her resolutions.

We also started a new book called Donavan's Word Jar. Donavan is a third grade boy, who like his classmates, likes to collects things. But his collections is a little different. He collects words! Yes, words.

Donavan Allen collects words.

We will be spending the next few weeks learning about Donavan's collections and starting a word collection of our own. Do you have any words that you like? Your 3rd grader will be asking you to share. So, be ready!

Here are some of our classmates discussing the book.

We have started a CLASS WORD JAR as well as individual word jars as well.

AREA!

We have been working on the areas of polygons for a few weeks. We made our own sports complexes. And, more recently, designed our own robots to work on the area of regular and irregular shapes. We have been working in math stations to practice math fluency, meeting in small groups to review concepts, and working individually or with a partner to answer questions.