3rd Blog – 11/11

We have been very busy these past few weeks! It was so nice getting to chat with you all about your children! We love gushing about the wonderful work they’ve been doing in class.

To celebrate our personal narrative stories, everyone had a chance to read their stories aloud. We then toasted with “champagne” to our first published pieces!

We started a new reading unit and a new read aloud! We started by looking at non-fiction books. We know that they are about facts, teach you something, provide definitions, and has photographs. We then looked at all of the features of non-fiction books from the table of contents through the index! We found diagrams, captions, bolded words, glossaries, headings and sub-headings.

Now it’s time to read non-fiction. We focused on finding the main idea and the details in a text. This was really challenging as the main idea is both general and specific at the same time. Everyone worked really hard! Now it’s time for research!

The students were given a list of potential Lenape research topics and were asked to rank them in the order they’d like to work on. Luckily, I was able to give everyone their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice. Now that we have our topic, we can focus our research. Using the skills we learned on features of non-fiction and finding the main idea and details, students are choosing a variety of books and articles, finding their topic, and writing down the details they learned while reading. This is the most challenging, but important, part of the research project and the students will continue to work on it throughout their schooling. 

Luckily, research isn’t only done through books, and we were able to get a hands on look at some Lenape artifacts on our trip to the Staten Island Museum. We got to look at different tools from the bows and arrows men used for hunting (and the pelts), the games children played, to the mortar and pestle women used to grind up corn. 

Though we’ve been focused on the Lenape of the past, we also read Indian Shoes, a book that centers around a boy and his grandfather, Native Americans of the now. This book is also interesting in that each chapter is a little vignette, or it’s own story. Ask your child which story has been their favorite!

We took a short break from learning about the Lenape to talk about the election! We learned about the different branches of government and why midterm elections were so important. We also thought about some of the problems New York faces and how we would address them if we were governor. Finally, we talked about the history of voting and when people of different races, genders, and ages were allowed to vote. 

Math with Luis

In Math, Third Graders finished their addition unit and moved onto subtraction. We spent the last week imagining the noises that numbers would make when we borrowed from them to regroup the ones, tens, and hundreds places. Extra practice regrouping on the homework is paying off!

STEAM with Sammi

Between the third grade field trip, conferences, and my absence on Friday- the third grade actually didn’t have any STEAM classes last week. This week, the third grade has started to learn Google Doc skills. We will be working our way across the toolbar, but began with changing the color of the text. Some students also began the next assignment, where they learn and practice text formatting of font, font size, bold, italic, underline, color, alignment, and spacing.

This is also a great moment to remind everyone that the 3rd graders should be practicing typing at home! Please have your student practice 3 times a week for about 15 minutes.

Art with Iviva

To complement learning about the Lenape Native Americans in social studies, we are selecting artifacts related to our research topics, including transportation and games, spirits and medicine, shelter, fashion, hunting and fishing, food and farming, art and storytelling, and roles in society. Viewing images of artifacts and contemporary Lenape art and objects, we are translating these into drawings and sculptures. It is fun to work with model magic, pipe cleaners, cardboard, paper and more to construct our versions of significant Lenape objects in three dimensions. 

Music with Heidi

In Music class, Third Graders have been learning to tune their ukuleles. This is a huge task, and they are doing very well with it! In addition, they are perfecting their up and down strums. They have also learned the names of each string and have been reading rhythms using the different strings.

Judaics with Shira

Last week we continued our study of Parashat Lech Lecha in Chumash class, identifying the names of the main characters in our story. We saw that there is an interesting looking map in our workbook, leading students to predict that their will be a journey in this story. We also saw that some characters are described in relation to their family members. We discussed: Why does the torah talk about people in this way? Would we like to be described in this way? Can we relate to being called someone’s sibling for instance?

This past Monday was the yarzeit of Hannah Senesh. We lit a memorial candle and sang Eli, Eli in tefilah. We learned about Hannah’s childhood and family this week through watching excerpts of the documentary “Blessed is the Match”. The children were fascinated by the historic photographs, archival footage of Budapest, and dramatic re-enactments in the film. We started to write lists comparing ourselves with Hannah, and we will depict this information in Venn Diagrams. Ask your child what new information they learned about Hannah this week. Who was in her family? What activities did she enjoy? Where did she live? Where did she move?