Lunar New Year

Gung Hay Fat Choy!  Today our classroom was transformed into the "House of Learn-ING."  We used the Chinese New Year to enhance our learnING. The holiday gave us many opportunities to read folktales and nonfiction text surrounding lunar new year.  One of the favorite activities of the day was called "New Beginnings."  With this activity students had to pick a word card out of a Chinese takeout box...with chopsticks of course!

Then they read the sentence on the card.  There was a bold word in the sentence.  Students added a prefix to the base word in the sentence to make it true.  For example, "pieces cut before" would be "precut."  The students worked so hard sorting and building new words with prefixes.

  

The students also enjoyed learning to write the numbers 1-10 in Chinese characters.  Then the students completed a dragon dot to dot written with Chinese numbers.  Students even opened the app Sum Stacker and used Chinese numbers to solve addition puzzles.

Are You Ready for Some Football?

In honor of the upcoming Super Bowl, we football-ed it up in the classroom! Our main learning focus was putting together our secret measurement playbook. In our playbook we took notes on measuring length, perimeter, capacity, weight, and time. We also had activities to practice each of these important measuring skills. The students worked very hard but I don't think they realized it...we were having too much fun!

With all this measuring work going on....I promise that I didn't ignore our English language arts objectives.  We worked on building informational paragraphs and identifying text structures.  After assigning referee signals to different punctuation marks, we edited and read sentences with our signals.  We also played a game on our mini football fields where students could earn yards by identifying a sentence as simple, compound, or complex. Touchdown!

We Heart Art

This month we have had the opportunity to learn about and paint in the style of two different famous artists.  First, we studied Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky.  He is known as the father of abstract art.  He is also famous for being able to hear color and see sound.  Here is a video of a picture book about Kandinsky.

In his style, we used watercolors to paint dots inside of a large heart.  The students really took their time to create very original pieces.

Next we learned about American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe.  We made giant poppies using oil pastels and water color.  They turned out so pretty.  These will be our "Original Works" art pieces.  So, you will have the opportunity to order various products made with your child's art.  Look for this artwork coming home with an order form mid March.

Forces of Flight

We love Project Lead the Way! Our last module was about the forces of flight.  There were five activities that we worked our way through.  Each activity was a project based, hands on scenario that had the students using science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to learn about flight.

We started by learning about balanced and unbalanced forces.  Ask your child if they know the four forces of flight: lift, weight, thrust, and drag. Through the study of flight, the students were introduced to Newton's laws of motion. We used an app to design different gliders, then we created gliders from our blueprints.  Last, we tested our gliders from our own binder launch pad.

In our final project of the flight module, students will create another glider that would carry weight or cargo.  The scenario was that there was a community in Nebraska that needed some relief supplies.  The gliders could get there faster than trucks on the roads.  Students have to design a glider that would carry as much cargo as possible to Nebraska.  Nebraska is 120 cm from the launch site.  Students will get three flight trials.  They are to record at least one trial and reflect in the caption.  

100 Days Smarter

We celebrated 100 days of working hard in third grade.  In years past, we worked on numbers up to one hundred. However, third graders...we needed a challenge. Guess what else goes in a 10 by 10 grid: a multiplication chart!  We went on a Hershey kiss hunt.  I hid 100 kisses in our classroom.  Each piece of chocolate had a product from the multiplication chart.  The students had a hundred different products to find and place correctly on the chart.  Of course, we sanitized each round. They worked really hard and smiled the whole time.

By the end of third grade, students should have all the one digit by one digit multiplication facts memorized. This is not an easy task and one that requires continual maintenance.  You've heard, "If you don't use it, you'll lose it." This certainly applies to memorizing multiplication facts.