3rd Grade: 1/28

Reading:

We are continuing to read Because of Winn-DIxie and learning all about the main character, Opal. We thought that she had a big heart for animals because she rescued Winn-Dixie, but we realized that it extended to people too when she asked Miss Franny to be her friend. We dug deeper into her personality to theorize why Opal is like this. We thought it might be because she’s lonely after moving to a new town and not having any friends. The thing she wants the most is to have friends. We then used our knowledge about Opal to make predictions about how she might act. When meeting Gloria Dump, we predicted that Opal was going to tell Gloria everything about her life…. and we were right!

Writing:

We chose our opinion thesis and began drafting. First we wrote everything we knew about our topic. Then we organized the information using colored pencils. After coming up with three reasons why we thought our thesis was true, we added three details for each reason. Then we finally started our draft! We also thought about our audience and added information speaking directly to them, including what their counterargument might be. Soon we’ll begin editing and publish our piece!

Social Studies:

We continued our journey through the history of New York. Last we left off, Hudson claimed the land around the Hudson River for the Dutch. About 20 years later, the Dutch West India Company was founded, with the intended purpose of starting a colony in the New World and trading. They claimed land from Delaware all the way to New England, and claimed New Amsterdam (modern day Manhattan) as their capital. While this land was under Dutch control, New Amsterdam had 7 directors. We researched four of the directors, Minuit, van Twiller, Kieft, and Stuyvesant. We were split into groups and given one of the directors to research. We read articles and took notes in our own words. Then we made posters and presented them to the class. Everyone wrote one thing they learned about each director. See the embedded videos of all the presentations!

Hebrew with Rimma

For the past two weeks students had a discussion about a school trip and what happens during the trip. Our focus was on different countries in the world, geography, flags and capital cities.

After classroom discussion, children wrote their postcards to a friend, by using the reading text as a model. This activity provides opportunities to write about their imaginary trip to the country of their choice, to describe a weather forecast according to the season and to recap clothing vocabulary, about suitable clothing to take on a trip.

Students discovered and became more  familiar with a world map where the various places are located. Through the game they had additional learning opportunities to enhance their Hebrew vocabulary that related to the names of the countries and the languages.

Students learned the structure צריך/ מותר/ אסור + infinitive, and discussed their meanings.

They practiced creating simple sentences in their writing and speaking about school rules, rules on the bus, rules in the library etc.

Next week we will start to talk about past events, trips or weekends. Students will be exposed to Past Tense in Hebrew. The map of the world will generate conversation about places that children have been to, when they went there, what they saw and ate there and they will start to use more and more Past Tense at least for the first and the second person.

Judaics with Shira

Students have been learning how to read, understand and categorize words from the chumash text. We played a sorting game as a class on the board and then took the new skills we acquired to the text. We found and highlighted the names of four characters, two places, and four action words in the verse. We learned that many action words start with the same two letters, a clue for helping us find verbs. These text skills will help us to understand the text in Hebrew, in order to be able to think more deeply about the text.

Music:

In Music class, Third Graders talked about lunar calendars (Jewish, Chinese, Persian, etc.) and the upcoming Lunar New Year on February 1st. They sang the song “Arirang,” a very famous Korean folk song in 3/4, often sung at major holidays and events. Third Graders practiced reading notes, and they sang Arirang while they played their C chord.