3rd Grade – 10/21

We completed the second half of Stone Fox! We were finally introduced to the character of Stone Fox. As this book was written in 1980, the character has many flaws, and we had discussions about voice and perspective. For example, what happens when a character has no voice? What impact does it have on the story we’re reading and on the way we view that character?  We also talked about stereotypes and what we’re supposed to infer about Native Americans from this character. In this particular story, Stone Fox is not written as a positive character and the students acknowledged that we are to infer that Native Americans are savages or violent, though we know that isn’t true. One thing we learned is, while reading, it is important to recognize and acknowledge perspective.

We continued working on our comprehension skills, asking questions and using something that happened earlier in the book to help answer them. We also asked questions of the author and why he made certain choices, even if we can’t answer these questions. For example, why is the book called Stone Fox?    

Finally, there were many emotions after completing the book. No one was satisfied with the ending, so students wrote a “Chapter 11” in their readers notebooks. 

In writing, we continued revising our stories, adding an interesting ending. Just like adding an interested beginning (or lead), an ending can talk about the future, a feeling, a summary of the story, or a lesson learned. We experimented with different kinds and chose the best one. Then we had a one-on-one conference and started the editing process! In editing, we use the CUPS method: capitalization, understanding, punctuation, and spelling. The exciting part is we get to use red pen! Finally, we rewrite our story in our best handwriting and publish!

In social studies, we looked at the different elements of culture. Culture is the way a group of people live. It can be any group of people from your family, your school, your city, or you country. We used Senesh as an example and filled out a culture chart. We looked at the social organization (students, teachers, staff, etc.), customs & traditions (kabbalat shabbat, the 3rd grade play, etc.) language (English and Hebrew), religion (Judaism), Arts & Literature (art, music, etc.), and forms of goverment (Nicole, Shelley, Lauren, Phyllis, etc.). Next we filled out a chart about what we knew and wanted to know about Native Americans. There were some great questions such as: What do they celebrate? Who is the leader? How many are still around? Do they have money? How did they survive? How did they get food? As we learn briefly about each area of their culture, the students will fill out the culture chart. So far we’ve learned where the Lenape lived, in what kinds of shelters, how they moved around on water and land, and what clothing they wore.

Judaics with Shira

The past two weeks have been all about holidays! Students can name the four main holidays in the month Tishrei, and we also learned about a fifth holiday, Shemini Atzeret. During Sukkot, we focused on the arba’at haminim, the four species. We learned a midrash that talks about the smell and taste of each of the species and what they can symbolize about a community. And of course all students had the chance to bless and wave the species. It has been great to see how excited this class is to perform various rituals!  This week we read the book “Maya Prays for Rain” and learned about the tradition of praying for rain during Israel’s rainy season. We added a new tefillah page to our siddur with illustrations about this new prayer.

Hebrew with Rimma

For the past two short weeks students introduced themselves to the class by drawing a self-portrait and describing how they look, how old they are, about their family, what they like, where and what they study and we discussed what they like most at school. 

Students learned new vocabulary and grammatical structures such as prepositions and their place in the sentence, conjugation of the verbs n gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural). Students watched a few video clips and had fun with interactive activities on the computer.

Math

In math, third graders have been practicing breaking apart numbers in their head (23 is like 20 + 3) and doing mental math. They’ve been deciding what their favorite mental math strategies are – number bonds with friendly 10’s or 100, “donating” from one number to another, add the ones & add the tens – and telling me and each other why their favorite is the best and why the others are unnecessary :). We also introduced the review game Fishtopia last Friday, which quickly became a favorite amongst our mathematicians. 

STEAM

In science classes, the third graders have continued to explore what a scientist is. We drew pictures of what we thought scientists looked like and in our gallery walk, realized that our pictures had many odd similarities. There were old men, crazy hair, lab coats, robots, safety goggles, flasks, and explosions. Why did so many of us think that is what scientists look like?! We did a little investigation into books, tv, movies, and the internet to see that these are the images of scientists that our brain has been taking in our whole lives. Truthfully, we know that scientists don’t actually all look like Albert Einstein or Dr. Doofensmirtz (from Phineas and Ferb). We then took a look at some actual scientists doing all sorts of different jobs such as marine biologists, CEOs of urban farming companies, scientific filmmakers, and children’s books authors. Finally, we read “Ada Twist, Scientist” and pointed out all the things that the main character, Ada, does that makes her a scientist. Ada is curious, observes the world around her, asks lots of questions, makes hypotheses, experiments, draws her thoughts, and asks more questions. We recognized that if these are things that we are all already doing, then we must be able to call ourselves scientists too! When you come in for parent teacher conferences, you can see the drawings we did with this work.

In technology classes, students have focused on understanding Google Classroom. We logged into the science class, investigated the different parts of Google Classroom, and did some practice assignments. We also took a typing pre-assessments so we can start our formal typing lessons soon.

Music

In Music class, Third Graders received their ukuleles and music binders! They had a lot of fun playing with the tuner for their first Seesaw homework assignment. Their second assignment is now in Seesaw – looking forward to seeing their videos! They like to share what they know, so be sure to ask them how to hold the ukulele and strum up and down. And make sure they bring their ukuleles and binders every Wednesday morning.