Grinch Day!

 Here at Eagle Cliffs we LOVE Grinch Day!  This year was filled with the best Who-dress and kind hearts.  For Grinch Day 2018, the Magic of Threes had a break out to work on.  To unlock the Grinch box, students had to solve a series of clues.  This is our 4th break out this year.  Students are really understanding how to work as a team and solve clues.  It is fun to hear them strategizing.

We also used the day to study similes and metaphors.  The Grinch song is packed full of them!  The students made a Grinch drawing in SeeSaw and wrote a caption with their own similes.  Here are a couple great examples.



At the end of the day, we had some Grinchy fun with our kindergarten buddies.  We made slime!  Just look at the smiles for miles!  Sticky, slimy, messy fun!  What a fabulous Grinch day!

Hour of Code

We are up for this challenge again this year.  We love to code.  Click start to begin writing your lines of code.

START

We celebrated "Computer Science Education Week."  The week was declared to bring computer science into schools and promote student interest in coding.  The Magic of Threes wrote over 2000 lines of code.  I see some future programmers in this class.  Click here to be linked to the challenges we worked on in class.  The students had to solve puzzles to program characters through mazes.  While they thought they were "playing" they were programming with loops, conditionals, and algorithms.  Students used logic and problem solving skills.  The challenges also tested their persistence and "I can" attitude.  As the students moved up in levels, the students received video tutorials by gifted computer scientists in the field like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.  Thank you to our Eagle Cliffs tech, Mr. Carter, for coming in and helping us!  We loved having our resident expert inside our classroom.



In addition to using code.org we also did some unplugged coding that went with our Candy Land theme.  I love watching the students think through coding challenges.

The "Hour of Code" just kicked off our computer science work.  We will continue coding in the new year.  I have lots of fun challenges in store including our Osmo coding blocks and introducing the students to our classroom robots Dash and Dot.  Stay tuned!

Candy Land Magic

It was the week before testing and what better way to review than... a Candy Land transformed classroom.  The students definitely had visions of sugar plums, but also worked with standards like vocabulary context clues, making inferences, fluency, multiplication, and more!

One of the students' favorite Candy Land reading activities was a fluency exercise.  With a fluency partner, students were given different nonfiction cards.  The students read the cards three times with their partners focusing on accuracy, rate, and expression.  When they were done with fluency readings, the students had to answer a question from the text.  Then, the partners traded cards for a new piece of text.



In math, the students also had several activities in the theme.  Students played Candy Land with a multiplication twist.  Each color on the game board represented a count by, for instance, a blue card meant count by 3's.  Before students could move their gingerbread man they had to skip count by that number.  Students got a lot of practice and they thought they were playing a game!  We also had candy themed word problems.  Check out SeeSaw for some more of our Candy Land posts!

Array City

It's Christmas time in Array City!  The students made these lovely winter city scenes in art and we added some math content by making and labeling arrays with the window patterns.

 

After students made their arrays, it was time to label with math content.  The third graders had to write the fact family for the array represented.  We even got into a math discussion about perfect squares and square roots.

Multiply It!

These third graders have been working hard at building a foundation for multiplication and developing strategies for multiplication.  This is one of our most critical standards for third grade.  We will continue to work hard on both multiplication and division in the New Year.


At school, we started with word problems with both multiplication and division situations.  We have drawn out multiplication with circles and stars.  We built arrays and even did an array hunt around the classroom.  One of my favorite activities has been building a multiplication chart out of arrays.






If you follow us closely on SeeSaw, you will notice so many posts deal with mulitiplication.  Another strategy we have been hitting hard is skip counting.  This would be great to practice at home, in the car, any old time!  It will really help with multiplication fluency.  At school, the students have enjoyed the skip counting mazes.  I did put them in your child's backpack to continue over the break.

We will continue to work hard all of January to fluently multiply and divide.  We will be practicing with apps, card games, one minute timers, the computer, dice, and even fidget spinners! Memorizing math facts is an important foundational piece to future math success.  As with any memorization piece, it won't stick without continued maintenance.   We will continue to practice at school but at home practice is essential to sustain fluency.  There are some fabulous apps for quick practice.  Check out Quick Math, Math Bingo, and Math Cards by clicking on the app names.  You may remember these apps from when we were working on addition and subtraction fact fluency.  These apps grow with you.  Also, if you have a computer at home with Flash, here are some fun interactive games to play.  Click on the links.

Meteor Multiplication

Fruit Splat Multiplication

Bleepy's Gifts Multiplication

Croc Doc Division

Demolition Division