Magic of Threes Bakery

The day before Thanksgiving break was the perfect day for mixing up the learning.  Our classroom was transformed into the Magic of 3s Bakery.  When the chefs arrived, it was time to cook up the days objectives.  What is a thesaurus's favorite breakfast?  Synonym rolls, of course ! We started by putting on chef hats and coats.  Then, we read a recipe for synonym rolls.

                                

First, the students had to sort synonym pairs in their baking teams.  Then, each student picked a word on a blank synonym roll.  The students had to use the thesaurus to come up with several words to go on the bun.  They had to navigate their way through the thesaurus using guide words.  The chefs really did some excellent work.  We celebrated their successes with tasty cinnamon rolls.  Thank you, Mr. Wilke for the delicious treat.

The afternoon brought more bakery learning; however, this time the focus was on author's purpose.  The chefs learned the ingredients that help us determine whether the author wrote a piece to Persuade, Inform, or Entertain....PIE!  The students were put in teams of four or five.  They had 24 slices of text.  Each group member made a selection.  They read the text to their team and had to sort the pieces into Persuade, Inform, or Entertain pie tins.  They worked so hard.  Each team member had to agree on the author's purpose for each piece of text.  Students had to justify their selections.

And....why were the students so engaged?  Because every six text pieces that the group sorted correctly meant that team got to play a round of Pie Face!  Oh my goodness!  Author's purpose has never been so fun...or sticky!

50s Day Mystery

The 50th Day of school started out in style.  The students and teachers looked like cool cats!  The room looked like a diner and the music was rock'in!  We even danced the hand jive!

Then, our fifty's day took a mysterious turn.  Mrs. Hornby came in with a mystery.  Someone had stolen another boy's microphone.  She had six suspects and a description of each.  We had to be her detectives to solve this 50th day mystery.

 

We solved reading and math puzzles to get clues.  Then, we used the clues with the descriptions to help us solve the mystery.  Students had to read passages and infer, solve math word problems, practice rounding, and balance equations.  It is a good thing Mrs. Hornby asked these third graders to solve this mystery because they have the skills!

We did it!  These super sleuths cracked the case and delivered their findings to Mrs. Hornby.  She gave the sleuths a "50 days Smarter" award and some bubble gum.  We also celebrated with root beer floats and more hand jive!

 

Kindergarten Buddies

This year, we are pairing up with Mrs. Highfill's class to be buddy classrooms.  We will do all sorts of learning activities with our kinder friends.  We have met twice now. We did some getting to know you activities and made the cutest little hand turkeys. The third graders really enjoy being the older students in buddy scenario.  They are doing a great job being peer role models.

Main Idea

In reading and writing we have been focusing on identifying the main idea and supporting details.  We started with mystery bags of details.  Students worked in small groups.  They took different items out of a canvas bag.  For example, in one bag there was a movie, popcorn, tv remote, and candy.  The group recorded the details and created a main idea sentence.  In the detail bag above the main idea could have been something like: We love to relax and enjoy movie night at home.  Students got lots of hands on practice with this concept....main idea and details.



Check out SeeSaw for more ways we are practicing with main idea and details.  The students love our main idea song (also on SeeSaw).  The November at home reading challenge has students writing an IVF sentence after reading a chapter each night.  This practice is helping students identify the main idea of each chapter.  The more ways we practice, the better we become.

Place Value Perfection

Place value and estimation is where we start our third grade math standards.  We have studying numbers and the place value patterns under 1 million for the last month.  If you are following us on SeeSaw I'm sure you have seen all the place value posts. We explored reading and writing numbers in standard form, base ten models, written form, and expanded form. We also learned important vocabulary like place, digit, value, and estimate. Exploring place value and developing number sense is foundational to all math concepts.  We practiced these concepts through games, paper pencil activities, iPad apps, whiteboard practice, and rich math discussions.

If you want some extra activities to play at home, check out Math Slides.  There is a great place value version and one called numbers >1000.  Another great app is called Mystery Number.  It is similar to this the number riddle games we have been playing in class.  The app contains four different games that give students lots of opportunities to explore concepts of number and place value. The games can be played with one player or two.  Check out Mystery Number ($1.99) on the app store. 

Here is a list of interactive web based games.  Each game works on place value concepts. Your child can click on the links for extra at home practice.

Build a Hundreds Chart
Skip Counting, 10, 5, 2
Base Ten Fun

Shark Pool

Scooter Quest. Play until level 3.

Fruit Splat.  Play the hard level.
Hockey Play level 2.

As you probably know, we are a standards based school.  This means, students don't receive letter grades based on an average or their classwork and assessments.  Instead, we are looking for mastery of specific content standards.  In order to be considered proficient in the area of place value and estimation, by the end of third grade, students must demonstrate that they can do the following:

Typing Club

Did you know third graders take their tests, including writing pieces, on the computer? They must know how to type! This week we started a free online typing tool called Typing Club.  The students worked so hard. The room was silent because they were concentrating so hard. We are going to strive for weekly typing practice.  I already heard that several children want to get on the blog at home and practice typing! They are loving it...and what an important skill this day in age.  Here are two great sites for teaching and enjoying practicing typing.  Happy typing!

Typing Club

Dance Mat Typing 

 

Amazing Artists

What do you get when Mrs. Jensen is the guest teacher?  A beautiful art lesson and a wonderful story  about Vincent Van Gogh.  Mrs. Jensen shared a great book called Camille's Sunflowers.  The book describes Vincent Van Gogh's time in a French village where he becomes friends with a family that lives next door to him.  It was during this period of his life that Van Gogh painted his famous sunflowers.  We used the text to analyze narratives.  After reading, we not only sequenced the plot events, we also sorted the events by important and less important.



Then, the students' favorite part!  They drew and painted their own sunflowers.  The students used oil pastels and a watercolor wash to create these amazing works of art.