3rd Grade: 10/29

Reading:

We continued using Stone Fox to strengthen our reading skills. We worked on making predictions and furthering our predictions by saying HOW something might happen, not just WHAT. We practiced retelling the story, taking big steps to mention the important parts of the story. Towards the end, we noticed that the text leads us to ask questions. Questions about what happens in the story (Why did Grandfather not tell little Willy what to do about the farm?) and questions about why the author made certain choices (Why did the author title the book Stone Fox?) The ending of Stone Fox is quite emotional. Ask your child how it ended and how they felt about it.

Writing:

We continued working on our personal narrative draft. We took a week to revise, working on adding an interesting lead, dialogue, thoughts and feelings, and a super ending. The next week we worked on editing our drafts using the CUPS checklist: Capitalization, Understanding, Punctuation, and Spelling. Finally we added a decorative cover! Keep a lookout for a way to share our published pieces!

Social Studies:

We have begun learning some general information about the Lenape tribe. They lived in and around New York State. We learned what structures they lived in, what clothes they wore, and what the roles of men, women, and children were. This is all in preparation for us to choose a particular topic of Lenape life to research.

Music:

In Music class, our Third Graders have been enjoying getting to know their ukuleles! They have been practicing ukulele care, tuning and open string note names (singing the names while playing the strings: G C E A). In addition, Third Graders have been reviewing the song Eli Eli, a poem by Hannah Senesh set to music by Israeli composer David Zehavi. You can look forward to hearing them sing it on Kesher Day!

Math

In math, we tied up our unit on mental addition and subtraction. This section was about discussing the strategies we use to do math in our heads. The most well-known strategy is the break apart method. In this strategy, you separate each place value and add them independently. For instance, if you are adding 724+275, you would break it apart by doing:

• 700+200=900
•   20+  70= 90
•     4 + 5  =  9
• 900+90+9=999

Or maybe you would rather add 300 and then subtract 25? A large part of our mental math studies have been focused on discussions on how to share our thinking. Students have been practicing doing this verbally, drawing number bonds, and by creating open number lines (see below).

Our students have also been working hard on their multi-digit addition and subtraction skills and how to use part-part-whole and comparison bar models to help figure out which operation to use to solve word-problems.