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.