3rd Grade: 12/17

Thank you so much for coming to our 3rd Grade Celebration! The students had a great time sharing their work in all subjects and are proud of the work they accomplished.

Reading:

Whodunit?! In reading, we have been exploring mysteries. As a class we read A to Z Mysteries: The Absent Author. We jotted down clues and suspects, thought about motives and opportunities, looked at different ways of organizing the information we collected (in a timeline, by main idea, or by chapter), and retold the main parts of the story. In the end, we were all very surprised at the outcome! If you want to know what it is, you’ll have to read it for yourself!

For the past two weeks, students have been working on Reading Responses. They have been writing in a formula, writing the title and author, a brief summary, answering a question, and looking for an example in their text to prove their thinking.

Writing:

In writing we are using these last few days before vacation to work on the components and structure of a sentence. So far we have identified the subject and predicate of a sentence and the noun, verb, and adjective. My favorite example was “3rd grade is awesome!” We will continue by working on adverbs, contractions and apostrophes, and frequently used homophones like their, they’re, and there.

Social Studies:

After learning what life was like for the Lenape, we began looking at why Europeans started exploring this part of the world. They were looking for an easier route to Asia because they liked all of the materials they could get from there (silk, spices, etc.) Henry Hudson was one of those explorers. He was born in England and grew up on ships. His first two voyages were for England, but ended with his ship only finding whales, seals, walruses, and ice. No new route to Asia. England did not want to finance any other trips, so Hudson made a deal with the Dutch. He just wanted to explore, he didn’t care who he explored for. This time he went west instead of north, and sailed all the way to Virginia, stopping in Maine to trade with the Native Americans. On his way back from Virginia, he sailed up to New York, stopping to encounter the Lenape and having altercations with them. They were already wary of the Europeans because they had bad experiences with them in the past. Hudson’s crew also only knew of them as “savages” and treated them as such. Sailing up the Hudson River, he encountered the Mohican tribe, which had never encountered Europeans and were therefore much more welcoming. Hudson declared all the land around the River for the Dutch. Finally, Hudson sailed back to England. Ask your child what happened when he landed in England (instead of Holland) and what happened during Hudson’s fourth (and final) voyage.

Hebrew with Rimma

Students had plenty of opportunities to practice new vocabulary related to clothing: what they wear in cold/hot weather, to school or during leisure time, to the gym etc. We regularly recap and reinforce previously learned structures, agreements between nouns and adjectives, nouns and verbs in gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural).

Students were exposed to the new vocabulary related to description of their room. They watched a video clip and described the room according to the picture. The description included several example sentences that were used as a model. The students will continue with preparing a mini project. They will draw their ideal room and will describe and present it to the class.

STEAM with Sammi

I missed the last blog post, so here comes a big catch up! As you saw in their publishing party, the 3rd graders learned how to use Book Creator. In class, students went through modules that taught them one new skill at a time and then they applied those skills into a class “All About Me” book. They then used these skills in Shannon’s class to make their Lenape books.

For most of this fall, we have used our classes to focus on technology skills so students were able to use their Chromebooks efficiently in their other classes. There is of course much more to learn, but we have begun to switch over to the “S” in STEAM – science! Students have begun to learn about and apply the scientific method. So far, we have done a sink or float experiment with lemons and oranges (ask your student how they can make an orange sink) and we are currently working to discover how many drops of water can fit on a penny.

We will continue working through experiments to deepen our understanding of the scientific method after the new year.