Author: Ms. Beck

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!

Click the movie below to watch us sing!

Check out a few shots from our first lesson in the garden!  We made some observations with our eyes, hands, and noses!  Check out the scientific “wafting” Grady demonstrated!  We planted some White Egg Turnips, and are eager to harvest them this winter!

           

Your children are interesting, hard-working, and a true team.

 

Our family meeting focus this week has been to exhibit mindfulness.  Ask your child how being mindful can help them deal with stress, ignore false alarms to the amygdala, be a better community member, and be more adventurous!  Check out these young mallards participating in a mindfulness sort!

    

We have also rounded off our study of graphs and line plots (for now) and have begun talking about the four forms of place value.  Can you child tell you about those four forms for three, four, five, and six digit numbers? (standard form, word form, model form, and expanded form)  We’ve added in quite a few place values this week, so it’ll take plenty of practice before it’s “easy!”

            

Do you know how to predict?  We certainly do!  We have learned that predicting is not just guessing what will happen next in a story or text, but it’s also about having evidence or proof from the pictures, text, or personal connections to make a smart prediction.  We have also talked about how predictions may not come true, even though we have proof, so then we have to revise our prediction!  Ask your child to tell you about all the books we predicted with this week.

Lastly, have you seen the Mallard on campus?  We will have the chance to name him this year.  What kind of creative names can you come up with?

Your children are such wonderful little people, and I’m thrilled to spend seven hours a day with them!

Yesterday we survived; today we dug in!  We learned all about our brains and how they react to danger, aced a spelling assessment, and designed a survey to learn more about our peers.  We also snuck in a few minutes of REAL reading around the room.  Enjoy some snapshots from our day!

Check out this video to see how our morning was spent! —->Our Class Video

 

Check out our video from our fantastic day at Monticello!

Take a look at these beautiful people!  Happy first day of warmth in a long time!

Tomorrow and next week, we will be talking about what it means to make choices with our money.  Because we can’t have everything we want and need, we have to make smart choices with our money.  The choice we make is our economic choice.  What we give up when we make that economic choice is our opportunity cost.  Talk to your children about what kind of choices you have to make when you are going to the grocery store, gas station, mall, and anywhere you spend/save money!

Have you ever laid eyes on one of these?  These are cool phenomenal capital resources called “ActivExpressions.”  They are used to interact with flipcharts, powerpoints, or anything on our great Promethean board.  We have mostly been learning to use them to practice in math, until today.  Today, we took our Wordly Wise quiz right on these bad boys!  Here’s how it worked: we took the quiz on paper, then entered our data into the ActivExpression, and sent the data to Ms. Beck’s grade book.  I bet you didn’t have anything like this when you were in school, huh?  Technology is amazing!

WOW!  These third graders created some phenomenal projects!  After months of research and project creation, we had our class fair and I would say it was a success!  Here are the pictures!  Five friends have their projects displayed in the library for the next few weeks, and the rest are on display in our classroom until the end of next week!  They should be SO proud of themselves!

Each week, Mr. Fernald puts up a math challenge for each grade level on the morning announcements.  Last week his problem was this:  Mr. Fernald measured his bookcase.  It was 48 inches long.  How many feet long was the bookshelf?

Check out all the different ways we figured out the answer!

Who would have thought the first snow of the season would happen the very first day back from winter break?

 

We had a surprise visit from one of our staff members, Mr. Gordon, playing “Jingle Bells” around the campus today! What a treat!

Mr. Gordon from Whitney Beck on Vimeo.

On Friday, we were able to take a trip to the Math Science Innovation Center (MSIC) to be innovators.  We used legos to build different machines and attach engines and different types of sensors.  Then we used a computer program to tell our machines what to do.  Once we knew our machines worked, Ms. Layne challenged our teams to create a Rube Goldberg machine where three machines work together to push a ball into a goal.  I have included a picture of a Rube Goldberg “Self-Operating Napkin” and a great video we watched about how they work.  What a great day!

Each Wednesday, we start our math block by doing a challenge math problem.  Today the question was as follows:

Look at the following sequence: 1, 7, 13, 19, 25…. Is 80 a member of this sequence?  Explain your reasoning.

The students are expected to solve the given problem and then write a few sentences to explain what they did to solve the problem.  Here are a few pictures of your children in action!  Ask your child to talk through what they thought and what we found the answer to be!  We discovered that we were using place value, patterns, and 100s charts to figure out our answers!

 Yesterday we visited the garden for our second lesson!  We fed our lettuce plants with crab flour and kelp meal!  You can imagine what all of that smelled like!

Then we came to the “kitchen” and learned to make a cooked swiss chard!  It was DELICIOUS!  Check out the recipe below!

It’s no secret we’ve been working on place value in math over the past few weeks.  Check out our fun day of reading and comparing six-digit numbers!  Ask your child to get out their math notebooks and show you how to play this weekend!

Take a look at this quote and write a sentence or two about what you think it means.  Do you agree?  Why?  Do you disagree?  Why?  Remember to use capital letters, punctuation, and make sure what you type makes sense!

I can’t wait to read what YOU think!

Guess what fun Ms. Beck got herself into last night?  That’s right…I went to see Koo Koo Kanga Roo!  It was so much fun, you would have loved it!  Click here –>Get Loose! video

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This past week we have tackled rounding three digit numbers to the hundreds and tens place!  While tricks are quick and most of the time correct, being able to show where any given number falls on a number line is the best way to prove a deep understanding for what rounding is.  We also talk about the importance of understanding the value of the digits, and knowing that the 8 in 987 doesn’t mean 8…it means 8 groups of 10, or 80!

This next week, we will be looking at rounding numbers with 4-digits to the thousands, hundreds, and tens places. Get ready for some frustration!  The more practice we give them, the easier rounding will be.  Check out this picture of Trey working hard to use a number line to round!