Today is Harvest Festival!

Tomorrow I will be sending home an invitation to our science fair as well as a list of materials.  Please know that you are not obligated to buy any of the materials on the list. The students have planned their science experiments, however, and I would very much appreciate the help.  The list that I am sending home with your student is a list of materials for his/her experiment (not the whole class). 

This week has been great.  Yesterday we had a math talk that I was very impressed with.  We solved the following problem:

Emily had 1,968 balloons to give away at the carnival.  She gave 489 on the first day and 847 on the second day.  97 balloons flew away.  How many did Emily have left over?

We had two great mathematicians offer two different answers, and we analyzed their work and found that while both had done equations that worked, one had made a small mistake in regrouping.  The fact that the class was able to come together and many kids were willing to bravely offer their work up for critique was amazing. It is important to me as a teacher that the kiddos leaving my class understand that mistakes are learning opportunities and that very intelligent people make mistakes.  It is also important to me that they come together and have real conversations about their thinking.  I am very happy to have all of your kiddos in my class.  They are incredible. 

This week we are going to be working more with subtraction strategies.  We are also going to be finishing up our first non-fiction unit in reading.  By the end of this week I am looking for third graders to be.

• Adding and Subtracting numbers in the thousands.
• Making Sense of difficult problems by applying their knowledge to figure out what they need to do.
• Justifying answers by explaining how they found their answer.
• Using text features to quickly navigate non-fiction texts.
• Explaining the usefulness of different text features.
• Finding the Main Idea of non-fiction texts.
• Finding the Key Details in non-fiction texts.
• Summarizing non-fiction including the Title, Writer, Main Idea, and Key Details.
• Asking and answering questions as they read non-fiction.
• Making meaning of new words when they read non-fiction.
• Using the new words they've learned as well as text evidence when they talk about non-fiction.

We are researching for our science experiments.  It is complicated work.  If you have a chance to take your kiddo to the library and encourage them to check out books about rocks and minerals and look for answers to their science questions, it would really help them to develop interesting experiments.

Today we really focused on Science.  We made observations of 12 different rocks, then we got a quick overview of the difference between rocks and minerals, some uses for rocks and minerals, and the rock cycle. 

In math we are beginning subtraction with regrouping.  This week in reading we will be focusing on doing research for our science experiments. 

Our system has been struggling to work with Google's, so I apologize for not having posted in a while.

Next week we will start subtraction with regrouping.  There is also Math for Parents Night on the 16th. 

In reading we are working on reading non-fiction texts.  We are going to be finding the main idea and author's purpose in non-fiction throughout the week next week. As we do that, we are also doing the research that we need to do in order to form hypotheses for our Rocks and Minerals experiments.  We will be using the information that we read in our non-fiction texts to form these hypotheses as well as to write research papers on our topics.

What a wonderful Open House!  Thank you all for coming. 

This week we are working in non-fiction texts.  We are using them to help us ask and answer question about the world around us.  We are emphasizing rocks and minerals so that we can get research done and start our science experiments. 

In math we have started addition with regrouping (up to 10,000). 

We started a new read aloud book.  It is called The Witches by Roald Dahl.  Please don't let your child read this book at home (or watch the movie) as it will ruin the surprise and make class time a little boring for them.  This book is hilarious and scary and very entertaining.  Read aloud is the quietest time of day for us by far because they are all SO engaged in the story. 

Thanks again! 

See you all soon.