Check out what we’ve been up to!

This week was a short week, but we worked hard to complete a lot of fun activities! We started off with going on a nonfiction text feature hunt in teams through a chapter out of a science textbook.  We worked in teams to label all the features with sticky notes!

In our introductory week with word study, we all tackled contractions, since that’s something all third graders need!  We were word surgeons, cutting apart two words and using band-aids as the stitches to create contractions.  We even remembered to use an apostrophe in the place of the missing letters!

On Thursday, we got to meet our kindergarten brain buddies.  We spread out on the hill and read books about autumn, pumpkins, and school.  I heard the third graders saying things like, “Let’s preview the text first so we can predict what the book will be about.” “I’ll read it to you first, and you can stop me if you see any words that you know how to read.”  “What was your favorite part of the story?”  My heart has almost never been as full as when I hear them teaching others!

On Friday, we had our second lesson in the garden.  The egg-white turnips that we planted two weeks ago hadn’t sprouted AT ALL!  We brainstormed reasons why that might happen and then planted mustard greens in seed flats, where they will grow in a greenhouse, and we will transplant them when they are good and strong!  Farmer Sara even made us think about math!  If all 22 students planted 2 seeds, how many seeds did we plant?

Finally this week in math, we learned a new game called “Build a Raft.”  Using base-10 units, rods, and flats, we rolled a die and tried to be the first person to 100, while trading out ones for tens as we went.  So fun!

It was a great week, and I can’t wait to see my baby ducks on Monday!