3rd Grade: 1/14

Welcome back to school! We hope you had a wonderful and restful break!

Reading

We started a new book, Because of Winn Dixie. We will be focusing on the characters. To start, we notice what our main character, Opal, does and says. We think about what that tells about her character and personality. So far we’ve notice that Opal loves animals and her father, the preacher. She looks out for those less fortunate than her. She is kind and brave.

Writing

We began our new writing unit, opinion writing. We all know this class is full of opinions! To start we thought about a thesis statement, what our opinion is. Then we wrote 3 reasons why we think that way. After thinking about problems in the world, we thought about what problems there are in our school, at home, and in our lives, and how we might solve them. Not only can you think about problems and solutions, you can also think of someone who is deserving of praise and all the reasons why. Next week we will choose a topic and start on our drafts!

Social Studies

This month we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. It is a time for us to reflect on how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. We started by examining Jim Crow laws in the South, beginning with Plessy v. Ferguson that allowed laws that were “separate but equal”. We read Ruth and the Green Book, and were even able to examine the actual Green Book and take a trip making stops with advice from the Green Book. We then talked about ways to fight injustice and inequality. Using some examples from the past, we examined boycotts, protests, speeches, and changing laws. Coming up with our list of injustices, we created our own protest signs.

Math

Our Third Graders have been multiplying and memorizing the numbers 0-12 for a couple of weeks now. They have learned different strategies for figuring out those hard-to-remember facts like the pesky eights. Students even created their own multiplication charts! To deepen their understanding and create more connections about multiplication, our students have been studying how multiplication facts relate to each other. There are many different ways to see different numbers. Look at just a few ways that the number 12 can be broken up here and the different multiplicative connections that can be made (courtesy of Steve Wyborney):

Learning multiplication through shapes likes these can help build a stronger mathematical foundation for multiplication and related division facts while building number sense. This week we started a new unit on multiplying numbers larger than 12. The students have begun learning about how arrays and the area model can be used to break down these larger numbers into more manageable pieces to solve. 

With this base of understanding, they will soon not just know the efficient multi-digit multiplication algorithm we are all familiar with, but why it works. 

Music

In Music class, Third Graders learned their first chord on the ukulele – the C chord. They also learned the ta titi or down down-up strum. The first time learning a chord can be frustrating, as it takes practice to get a nice pingy sound when putting your finger on a fret. Please encourage your child to practice every day – the ping will get easier the more they practice! There is an assignment in Seesaw that reviews the new skills. A video is due by Tuesday, January 18th. In class, we also played the C chord and the strum while singing a little bit of “We Shall Overcome.”

Hebrew with Rimma:

The students finished a mini Unit about Weather. We studied how to describe weather and practiced calculating the temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa.

At the end of the unit about weather, children prepare a forecast video about the weather in New York. Please watch their videos on Flipgrig.

We started our new Unit about Traveling and school trips. Students learn how to organize a field trip with a class, how to pack a suitcase for the trip—what type of clothing to take according to weather and the season, what objects to pack etc. Next week students will write an email to the parents letting them know about imaginary trip (when, where to, what to take etc)

Students will discuss what is forbidden on the trip, on the bus, in the park, in the library etc by using the vocabulary that they studied this week.

Science and Technology

Over the last two weeks we’ve done a variety of different activities to get settled back into school and accommodate remote students. We set intentions for the new year, thinking about what we want more and less of in 2022. To no surprise, we would mostly all like less covid and more in person school! We checked out pictures from Volcano National Park, one of my vacation stops in December. On our snowy day, we did a challenge called “Snowman Stretch” where students had to work with their team to build the tallest snowman possible. We continued our scientific method unit by seeing how many drops of milk, diet coke, water, and lemonade fit on a penny. Ask your students about this one and they can also show you a water magic trick! Finally, we started a unit on digital citizenship and our first lesson focused on safe passwords. A busy 2 weeks getting back into the groove of school!