Thank you for coming to our 3E Museum of Science last night.  Having an authentic audience really matters.  You should have seen the flurry of activity Thursday afternoon.  I know that many of the children are looking forward to choosing another topic to explore and share with others.  Thank you for listening and questioning – and accepting their best efforts at researching and questioning, spelling and punctuating, designing and presenting.  This was a great start.

Exploring Place Value

We’ve continued our focus on place value through the ten thousands place and are learning to add vertically.  We are also working to understand how thousands group into ten thousands and ten thousands group into hundred thousands rather than just growing from one thousands to millions.  We’ve been writing, reading and ordering large numbers.  The children are beginning to feel more comfortable using the standard algorithm though we have many more days before everyone is feeling confident with that process.  Some children know how it works, while others are really puzzling through this process.  It feels like a good challenge for them.

Magnets

We’re still having fun exploring magnets. We are using them in several different science labs to remind us of the different steps in the scientific process:  Question, Hypothesis, Material, Procedure, Observation and Conclusion.  Our first lab was to see if we could turn a nail into a magnet that would lift a paper clip.  Ask your child what happened with that experiment.  Our second experiment was to see if cereal that had been fortified with iron was magnetic.  Your child can tell you what we discovered. Some of the class got to work with a third experiment to understand the properties of magnetic poles.

We’ve read quite a few books about magnets and now we are testing out what we think to know to fine tune our facts.  For example at first we thought that metal was magnetic.  Now we know that iron, steel, cobalt and nickel are the only metals that are magnetic.  Of those iron and steel are most common.

Thinking about Sentences

We are learning the names for the parts of all sentences, about the different kinds of sentences and about the different types.  We know that every sentence has a subject and a predicate, or another way to put it is someone or something that does something, or a noun and a verb.  We have learned about simple and complex sentences.  We looked in the books we are reading individually to see how authors use a combination of sentence types to make their work interesting and effective.  We’ve also learning about statements, questions, exclamations and interjections.  Our goal for this work is to consider audience more often and think about the flow of our words and the impact they have.

Bits and Pieces:

• On Monday we have the opportunity to meet authors, Rich Wallace and Sandra Neal Wallace.  Since several of their books are about sports, Mrs. Sherouse is encouraging the students to wear sports related clothing.  We are looking forward to hearing them.
• We are enjoying Zorgamazoo.It is our current chapter read-aloud and the whole book is written in rhyme.  It is pretty amazing.  See if your child can tell you what is happening in space with Dullbert Hohummer the Third.
• Our focus this week with Social Emotional Learning was to work at doing personal bests while also being aware of how behavior affects others.  If you’re talking to someone during reading time, even if the conversation is about a book, neither of you have been able to meet the reading expectations for the day.
• We have used The Three Questions by John Muth to guide the behavior choices we are making so that everyone can do their best learning.  The questions are:  When is the best time to do things?  Who is the most important one?  What is the write thing to do?  And the answers are:  There is only one important time and that is now.  The most important one is always the one you are with.  And the most important thing is to do good for those who are standing at your side.
• To celebrate the 100th day of school (likely to be February 5) Grade 3 is collecting 100 bags of dried beans for the Seacoast Food Pantry.  So far we are a 1/10 of the way there with 10 bags already collected.  Please send in your donations as soon as possible.  It is exciting to see the collections grow.

 

This week I had the opportunity to share work from our classroom in a process called Rounds North at Endicott College.  It is a review process designed to help educators notice and truly see student work to then fine tune your teaching in ways that further support the students.  We spent over three hours exploring the work and wondering about the thinking behind it.  I left full of wonder and curiosity about all the thinking that is going on in our classroom.  I am anxious to sit with the children to ask them more about their thinking.  And I look forward to supporting them in finding ways to share more of those ideas through their words and illustrations.

I have also been exploring the notion of mindfulness in the classroom and am reading The Way of Mindful Education by Daniel Rechtschaffen.  His call for children to have uninterrupted blocks of time to think and feel settled and more aware has made me wonder about our schedule and pace.  Having the time for reflection that participating in the Rounds protocol offered made me wonder about finding time for quiet in our classroom as well.  Taking time to see all that was in the student work was a real gift.  I am grateful for that chance and am looking forward to sharing my renewed sense of appreciation for the thinking in 3E with our class.  Stopping to notice what is happening now in the moment, rather than looking on to the next set of standards and expectations has helped me notice their is much learning to celebrate in our class.

Celebrating Kindness and Gratitude – S.E.L.

This week we joined the “Compassion It” movement to see if we can make compassion a verb.  We are trying to notice how small acts of kindness, care and support make us happy and make our classroom a more relaxed place to learn together.  There is a short video on the website. You might like to watch it with your child to begin a conversation about how small acts of thoughtfulness add up and make an impact.  You can find it here:  http://compassionit.com

We’ve been reading books like Ordinary Mary’s Extraordinary Deed and Weezer Changed the World along with taking time to think about and notice how we help each other feel happier and more successful in what we are doing.

 

 

Lots of Writing and Creating

This week we created collage illustrations from the painted papers we created to go with our fables.  It was a thoughtful process to plan and put pieces together to bring one part of the story to life.  It seems like the class had fun exploring color and shape and finding ways to add detail to show action and emotion.  Every illustration is different and striking.

The class has continued to work on their museum displays for next week.  Our 3E Museum will be Thursday, January 22 from 5:15 to 6:15.  That is the mid-point of the three families who responded to our survey.  We hope all the children will be present to share their research, writing and display.  And of course we hope all the families can come to view the displays and ask questions of the researchers.

The children have also shared lots of their ideas through their blogs.  It is interesting to see the different topics the students choose to write about and how they decide to illustrate them.  Depending on whose blog you read, you may notice the friendly competition to have the most words in a post.  This has not always led to the best writing – but it has created a fun atmosphere around blogging and is helping children think about the kinds of things they can write about and share.  Some of the children are working to create original stories, others are writing about favorite video games or afterschool activities.  Still others are writing book reviews or directions for things to make.

Reading the comments that are left on the blogs helps the children consider the impact their writing has on an outside audience.  It helps them consider what their words mean to readers.  So thank you for taking that time.  It is greatly appreciated.

Bits and Pieces –

• We are learning about place value and working with larger amounts.  We are finding ways to record math our math thinking more efficiently.
• We have a challenge with Mr. Caron on Tuesday, January 20.  I may be outdoors so the children should be ready for that event if the weather allows.
• We have nearly completed learning the whole cursive alphabet.  Some of the upper-case letters in this particular alphabet system are quite different but we are getting the hang of it.
• Ask your child what is happening with Morty and Katrina now that they have reached Zorgamazoo in our chapter read-aloud.
• We’ve begun learning about magnets and magnetic force.  We’re learning the terms attract, repel, poles and lines of force.  See if your child can name the metals that are attracted to magnets or the theories about how magnetism works.  If may be a little early in our exploration, but they are beginning to understand – and magnets are fun!

Happy New Year!  We hope you had an enjoyable and restful vacation.  It has taken the full week to get back into the swing of school.  It has been a chatty week – everyone excited to talk about the video game conquests and ways that have been found to vanquish different foes at different levels.  Lots of whispered gossip, and stories told to some and not others in the hall and classroom.  This chatting has taken up much of our learning time this week.  I know the class was excited to see each other and it was a full moon.  I hope, though, that we can encourage the children to consider their goals in school.  We reviewed our class rules and did establish that fact that school was a place for learning and growing and for helping each other do his or her best.   With your helpful reminders, we can hope that next week brings renewed focus and attention to our classroom work.

SEL – Gratitude

This week we have thought about what we are grateful for.  We have thought about favorite things and things we’ve become attached to.  We’ve read and illustrated version of the song, My Favorite Things and Owen by Kevin Henkes.  We’ve tried to take time to notice the things we forget are gifts like lights and running water, heat and shoes.  We read Two Sandals, Four Feet about life in a refugee camp.  And we have stopped to notice the gifts of nature.  Snow by Cynthia Rylant led us to that discussion.  Pausing to notice all our gifts – great and small – leads to appreciation and happiness.  Happiness allows people to be more available to learning and understanding.  We’ll be exploring gratitude for the next few weeks trying to notice more of the daily gifts we receive.

Information Writing – Teaching Others

Our classroom museum will be on January 22 – we are gathering feedback from families before deciding on the time.  Please save the date.

The class determined that they’d be ready to share their research and teach others what they have learned on January 22. This is the culminating event of a self-directed inquiry project.  You’ve been reading about this for weeks and know that each student selected a topic he or she wondered about and would like to research as a scientist.  They asked questions and used both text based and online resources to find the answers to the questions they began their inquiry with.  They read and took notes.  They watched videos when they could and worked to understand.

Now the children are organizing their new information to create a display to teach you what they know.  The process is interesting to watch.  Some children answered their question by looking through images.  The learned new things and made some assumptions based on what they saw.  They know of things that could be taught, but don’t have all the information.  Now that an audience has become more obvious, they are now working to gather information to share. Some children found the answers to specific questions and have a collection of facts to share.  Still others asked more general questions that lead to more questions and so on.  They have thought quite a bit about their topic and have quite a bit of information to share.  When you come to tour the museum you’ll see these differences.

The Reason for the Seasons

We are learning about the seasons – what they are and how they happen.  Our goal is to be able to explain how Earth’s tilt, the rotation of the planet and it’s orbit fit together and bring us the seasons.  We are learning about solstices and equinoxes.  In addition to this the children are choosing a favorite season and will work to write an essay to convince others to change their minds.  We are having fun exploring these ideas.  Ask your child what season they have selected and what their top reasons are.  It is fun to see how they think about the year and what they notice and like to do.

Exploring Place Value

We are beginning a study of place value and are learning how to work with larger numbers up to the hundred thousands.  We will be learning how to use the standard algorithm for addition and subtraction.  We have learned the word “digit” and we have practiced reading numbers to identify the value of a digit in a variety of places.  We have played a game – Guess, Digit, Place and another called How Close to Zero as a way for the children to become more aware of the idea of place value.  I am guessing they would have a good time teaching you either of these games.  They are quick, but fun.

Bits and Pieces

• Our challenge this week was The Hidden Maze.  First we created a 6×6 square on the floor.  Then we had to discover the path through the maze – the goal was to work silently together to find which tiles were on the path and which were not.  That meant many had to take risks and make mistakes before the entire class could get through the maze.  It took cooperation and careful observation to complete the challenge.
• We began a new chapter read-aloud called Zorgamazoo.  Right now we’ve met the main characters – Katrina and Morty – and are just learning about how they come together and join for a quest.  See what your child has to say about the adventure.  One of the most interesting things about the book is that the whole thing rhymes.  We are enjoying it.