Happy November! This week we have been celebrating, writing reflections about ourselves as learners, readers, writers and mathematicians and studying trees. Reflecting is a challenging process; finding words to describe the things you do everyday is difficult.
Taking Time to Know Ourselves as Learners
Social Emotional Learning
To begin the reflection process the children have been looking at their work – either the books that seem to be a good fits when reading, or the many pieces of writing they have been drafting or the math problems they have been solving – to reflect upon their learning process in each of those areas. Some of the children are able to see what they are doing and seem excited to explain how they make their choices and why. Other children just can’t. I don’t know if they can’t see what they do in contrast to what they worry they don’t do or if they can’t imagine explaining something they assume you know about them already. It is hard for them to find words to describe what is going on inside their minds as they work and learn and choose.
This struggle is typical for 8, 9, and 10-year olds. They are in a transitional stage moving between concrete thinking to more abstract. They are becoming more aware of their choices and the unique strategies they use for thinking things through. The truth is the more they practice, the better they will get. Metacognition (thinking about your thinking) is the way we all grow and learn. Challenging or not, the children will each do what they can and be ready to share their reflections at goal setting conferences in mid-November.
Painting Our Fish
Mrs. Haight helped us paint our rock fish. We have fun designing our own fish inspired by Lillian Kranz’s books, Only One You and You Be You. First we selected the rocks and traced them, next we painted them white. While they were drying we used our tracings to plan patterns and designs for our fish. Next we copied the designs onto the rocks with sharpie and finally we painted. This was one time when we were truly working to stay in the lines. They were beautiful and the children were excited about their accomplishment.
Celebrating Science
Thank you for the support you gave your child in learning about their scientist and coming to understand the work they do. Each of the children did a terrific job sharing their artifacts and explaining the work of their scientist to the class. As Hajna put it when she had finished sharing her artifacts, “I didn’t know very much about what a meteorologist did, but now that I do, it pretty interesting.” That was a goal of our study – to increase awareness and open doors.
It was fun to meet together with the other third grade classes to see if there were matches and to compare different artifact collections. Children thought of things in very different ways. Some children were “one and onlys” and they shared their work with a different type of scientist so they could learn about that area of science. Sharing across classes was exciting as well.
Yesterday Mr. Gustafson came to school from the SEE Science Center in Manchester talk to us about problem solving and science. One of the first questions he asked the third graders was if they knew about scientists. Every hand went up – seismologist, speleologist, psychologist, volcanologist were a few of the names given. The children were excited to know and realize they had lots of information and answers for that question.
Next he asked them for help in finding out how many different ways they could solve the problem of dropping two letter size pieces of paper so that one hit the floor before the other. The kids came up with lots of different solutions and had fun thinking of more later on. They also realized the piece that hit first when crumpled was not heavier – aha!
The next idea he encouraged us to think about was realizing that observations are made with all our senses, not just sight. We learned about exothermic and endothermic chemical reactions, combustion and catalysts while he showed us some pretty amazing things. It was exciting. He encouraged them to stay involved with math and science because working as a scientist and developing new things in a lab was pretty exciting work.
Bits and Pieces:
- Our next challenge with Mr. Caron – outdoors weather permitting – will be on November 7.
- Our Student Led Goal Setting Conferences are planned for November 14 and 15 – please select a time on the attached schedule
- Term 1 report cards will be sent home November 26. These do not have written comments. We will meet for parent – teacher conferences in the first week of December to review the goals your child presented and set some of ourselves as we work together to support and promote learning.
- We finished Marty McGuire Digs Worms and hope to begin a worm composting project too.