Our weeks in the classroom fly by – it is amazing to me when Thursday comes along. It feels as though we have done so much but se still have so much to accomplish and, of course by then, time is running out. This week was full of multiplication, our numbers of the week routine, cursive, developing plans to achieve our goals, reading, writing, research and inquiry projects
3 E’s Inquiry Museum
Thank you for setting aside time on Thursday, January 24 to come to our museum from 6:15 to 7:15. The children are quite excited about their projects and what they have been researching. They have worked through quite a process and now are in the creation phase of the work. It is interesting to see how each of the children approaches the research process to becoming an expert. Some of them have really taken up that challenge. They have read widely and worked to develop their own way of sharing what they have learned. Others have copied a great deal of information and are working to put those pieces together. They are now realizing they have to find their own words in order to teach others what they know. They are discovering how important it is to understand rather than to have pages of information written down. Still other children have lots of pictures and are now realizing they have some reading to do so what they are guessing from the pictures is actually true. You’ll enjoy seeing the variety and uniqueness of each learner. This first research presentation is a steep learning curve because so much of it is new and they have been working to do as much as possible independently.
Now they are considering how to share what they know in display that will make you want to stop and talk to them. They are considering how neatness and eye-appeal will matter. They are thinking about accuracy and planning as well. They seem very excited about what they have to share and are looking forward to having the opportunity to teach others about their interests and learning explorations.
Spelling Well
Part of our conversation about the presentation has been about how spelling, punctuation and neatness really matter. The class is thinking more and more about their spelling in daily use. We are working to eliminate capital letters where they do not belong and put them where they do so that words are spelled correctly in that way. And we are working to pay attention to our daily written work so that we notice and fix a few bad habits. We are trying to keep things like “whent”,“dose” and “isent” from happening when we really mean went, does and isn’t.
Last week we discovered that in general we spell 82% of the most common word correctly. We would like to raise that to 100% and we’d like to spell all of what we write with at least 95% accuracy. We talked about learning and growing and trying new words to stretch in that way too so we are not thinking we’d be perfect spellers in our first draft work. We want to try new fancy words too. We also discovered that we only use punctuation and capital letters about half of the time. We know we could use them all of the time if we tried to remember so we are working on that too.
This week we finally worked on our third group of cursive letters – the loop group. We hope to know all of the lower case letters by the end of February and then we’ll see what we can write using those letters.
Multiplication Arrays
We know that arrays always have to be rectangular. We know that the area of the rectangle can be discovered by knowing the height times the length. We’ve noticed that there are many different ways to arrange 12, 24 or 36 tiles. We know that multiplication isn’t hard to understand and knowing the facts is important – larger sets are just too many to count.
Silent Maze Challenge
This week our challenge involved concentration, observation, cooperation and self-control. The children had to work together and learn from one another’s mistakes in order to accomplish the challenge. We noticed that there was such a thing as too much silliness – it might be funny, but it doesn’t get the job done. That lead us back to our habits for success – grit, self-control, social intelligence and optimism all played a role in our ability to accomplish the goal. Adding personal flares here and there contributed the zest. We are noticing how the habits for success impact almost everything we do.
Bits and Pieces –
- The 100th day of school is 17 days away. The school is going to collect food items for the Portsmouth Food Pantry. Grade 3 is collecting canned beans – they didn’t specify so we are thinking any and all will be greatly appreciated. If every child brings in a can or two we will have our 100 collection in a trice.
- Ask your children what is happening in Wildwood – the action is pretty amazing. The class was finding it hard to believe that adults would act as dishonestly as some of the characters in Wildwood do.
The photographs for our post were taken by classroom photographers: Elijah, Julia, Joe, and Garrett
We’d love to know what you think of our work and the way we share our classroom with you.