Camp Lincoln – an awesome field trip

Today’s post was written by all the students in 3E:  Liam, Emma, Logan, Sophia, Ellia, Ella, Michael, Mady, Olive, Cooper, Eddie, Ryan, Charlie, Gabriel and Hayley

Here’s what we did at Camp Lincoln.  When we got there, we were excited because we were going to be there all day!

Mowgli welcomed us to Camp Lincoln at the picnic tables.  We followed him to the sports field.  He had us make a big circle with our entire grade.  We played a game about well we listen.  He also taught us a game called Knee Tag.  In Knee Tag you are safe if you put your hands on your knees.  When your hands are on your knees you can’t move.  Mowgli and Riptide also led us in the Clap, Jump, Spin and Run game.  It was lots of fun too.

After the games we went on a nature walk with Wolf. First, we visited the farm animals.  We saw chickens, ducks, goats and sheep.  Then, we found plants we could eat.  We found wintergreen and Indian cucumbers.  The wintergreen tasted and smelled like root beer!.  To find an Indian cucumber, look near water.  Be careful when looking for the Indian cucumber.  Dig around the stem and you will find a white root!  Clean it off  and taste it!  It tasted like a carrot!   After that, we made Nature Tea.  We used hot water, wintergreen leaves, and pine needles.  Some of us thought it was delicious, and some of us through it was yucky!  Finally, we reached the Point.  There were trees that had been struck by lightning.  They had stripes and broken branches.  We had lots of fun on our nature walk.  “AROOH!!!”

For the third part of our day, we began playing a game like Red Light, Green Light to steal a counselor, Riptide’s keys.  Once we got his keys we “drove” to the “zoo.”  We crossed a rickety-rockety bridge over a swamp to get there.  Once we got to the “zoo” we sorted out our animal names by size:  small, medium, and large.  We didn’t like the orders at the zoo, so we ran away.  We (the animals) had to cross over a “peanut butter pit,” but first we had to get the rope.  We made a lasso out of our sweatshirts to reach it. When we had the rope we had to swing across to escape the zookeepers.  There was only one tiny boat for all of us to fit on.  We swung across one at a time.  We huddled together like penguins on the boat so everyone was safe.  Our escape was a success.  And our adventure was lots of fun!

Camp Lincoln was fun because we got to do so many different activities and game.  It was a great day!

Our Week – September 21

What a great week full of firsts!  We had our first indoor recess and picture day.  We had our first field trip.  Going to Camp Lincoln on Thursday was wonderful.  We continued to learn more about hurricanes and other rainy weather. We did some math fact checks and began to explore multiplication. I’d say 3E is a pretty nice, learning place to be. We’re smoothing out the kinks in our schedule and finding time for learning to combine with fun, action, literacy and art.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the class blog, please do.  On the blog you can see many of the things we’re doing in our classroom and as a class.  In a couple weeks your children will each be posting on their own blogs as well.  If you go down below, the subscribe box is at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.

S.E.L. –Learning More About Reflection / Exploring the Theory of Multiple Intelligence

Each day the children follow an agenda for the day.  This helps them know what to expect.  We talk about it each day at Morning Meeting and discuss places where we may need to be flexible with the timing and respectful of each other’s learning styles. We all take different amounts of time to do things. At their table seats they have a more detailed copy of “Our Day” to follow.  At the end of each day or the morning of the next day, they’ve been asked to highlight some time of the day when learning stood out to them.  This practice helps us learn more about reflection and metacognition.  Metacognition, thinking about your thinking, strengthens and deepens learning.  These weekly reflections (I’m guessing it will take us a two of three weeks before we’re really benefitting from the routine) will become the foundation of our learning portfolios.  You may want to talk to your child about what he/she found most significant this week and why.  Doing this, will only add to your child’s learning and growth.  Thank you!

We learned about Howard Gardener’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences.  We discovered there are lots of ways to be “smart” – eight, in fact. We know that everyone is some of all eight of the intelligences, but interests and experiences help us strengthen some more than others. We use some of the intelligences more than others because we find them interesting or we feel good when involved with those kinds of activities.

We read several more biographies to look for signs of all the different ways people show their multiple intelligences.   We read about Jane Goodall, Margaret Hamilton (she programmed the computers that sent the Apollo rockets to the moon), and Alan Rabinowitz (called the Hero of Wild Cats.) It’s interesting to see how many ways people influence the world around them. We are learning we influence our world too.  We are beginning to complete surveys and explore a sketch-note of the eight intelligences so we’ll be able to uncover how we each approach learning in our own unique way.  We’re trying to discover our learning styles so we can our strengths to our advantage.

Climate and Weather

In science we explored the difference between climate and weather.  Through a Mystery Science video and activity we learned where different climate zone are in the world.  Our map shows tropical, polar, temperate and mild climates.  We did not add the deserts, but we know there is a fifth climate zone.

We recognized how weather is all about water and the water cycle.  We could feel the water in the air and could tell that our weather was being impacted by air masses moving up from the south.  We could feel the remains of Florence and could imagine how devastating that storm was when it came ashore.

This week we’ve read more about hurricanes and we’ve read about how thunderstorms form.  We’re learning about air pressure and all the elements of the atmosphere that meteorologists pay attention to in order make predictions about what the weather will be like in the days to come. We’re looking forward to having Hayley LaPoint, a meteorologist from WMUR, come to visit 3rdgrade in two weeks.

Learning About Multiplication

When I asked, everyone in the class thought they were not quite ready to begin learning multiplication. They thought doing multiplication would be hard.  Then we got started and learned multiplication is a faster way of adding. If we have lots of groups that are the same we can find the total with multiplication – and save ourselves counting mistakes.  We’ve discovered, t the start, multiplication isn’t all that difficult.  This week we’ve been exploring multiplication as repeated addition and looking for how groups repeat.  We’ve surprised ourselves by realizing we already know quite a bit about multiplication because we know about skip counting.

Bits and Pieces – 

  • We finished our second chapter read-aloud, Phineas L. MacGuire – Erupts.  Several of the kids said, “That’s it. It’s over?  That’s the ending.”  It is a little bit of a surprise.  It seems like the story is about winning the science fair and proving who is the best scientist, but actually it’s about friendship and learning to be confident about who you are.
  • We are starting to read I Survived the Children’s Blizzard of 1888.  We’ll learn more about weather and I hope children who’ve not found this series will.  They’re exciting and great windows into important historic events.
  • We continued on with some beginning assessments.  This week we did some math fact checks.  The end of the year goal is that children know all 70 addition and subtraction facts in 5 minutes or less.  The reason for this, is that knowing math facts instantly without counting on or back makes more difficult math that much easier.  That said, we also realize that the timed format of these check don’t work well for all children.  They know the facts, but feel anxious about the format.  Please don’t focus on the score.  If possible focus on improvement.  Play games where there is a lot of repetition – dice games are great for that.  They more they practice, the easier they’ll be.  Thank you!
  • We had so many fabulous pictures and quotes about our Camp Lincoln trip that we’ll be making a second post about the trip later on today.  We’ll all write it together and learn more about the “blogging dashboard” while doing it.