3rd Grade: 3/25

What a week it has been for 3rd grade! If nothing else, we are resilient!

These past two weeks have been filled with highs and lows. We celebrated Purim together with games and crafts and mitzvot. It was exciting to see everyone in costume! We also had fun playing freeze tag with our buddies and exchanging mishloach manot with them.

It was also nice seeing you all at conferences and sharing your child’s progress. It’s amazing how far they have come since the beginning of the year!

We are continuing book clubs, practicing talking about our books and deepening our thinking. This week we worked on comparisons. Some made text to text comparisons and some made text to self comparisons. We also took some time to allow members of our club to catch up so the club is all on the same chapter.

We finally published our biographies! They are amazing! You can view the library here. To celebrate, everyone had the chance to read three different biographies, write what they learned, and then gave the author a compliment!

Our next writing unit is fairytales! Though some are more excited than others, it will give the students a chance to be creative. We read the original Cinderella together. After making a list of other fairytales that we know, we had a chance to practice storytelling and told one story to our partner. We then looked at different adaptations of Cinderella and came up with a list of ways to change a fairytale. Next, the students will choose from two fairytales and begin to write an adaptation.

In social studies, we continued looking at the Erie Canal. We watched a time lapse video of a boat going through the canal. It was fun to watch the boat in the locks and see the water lift and lower the boat. Zooming back into New York City, we started learning about why the Brooklyn Bridge was built. Ferries going across the East River were not the most efficient so John Roebling, a German architect, had the idea to build a bridge. Like the Erie Canal, people initially thought it was a crazy idea, but when the East River froze and Brooklyn residents couldn’t get to work, they realized a bridge was the way to go!

Judaics with Shira: Purim and 100 Years of Bat Mitzvahs

After working on their individual megillah pages last week, students finished assemblying their pages together to form a class Megillat Esther this week, in chronological order of the story. On each page, students had to conceive of a title, design a scene, and compose speech and thought bubbles for characters to depict the contrast between internal and external communication. They also copied down the Hebrew verse of tehir scene, highlighted the names of characters, adnd added crowns above the words מלך and מלכה (king abd queen). This was something we learned from looking at a real megillah scroll in class two weeks ago, which has illustrations above the word king, a common motif in megillah scrolls.

This week students also got to learn about the history of the Bat Mitzvah in America. We heard directly  from a Senesh 7th grader who was featured in this NPR segment. Students who were remote also had a chance to hear from Shira’s mom on Zoom, who talked about her own experience not having a bat mitzvah, and then deciding to have one later at the age of 50. Shira’s mom, who is also a Jewish educator, was so impressed with the remote third graders and delighted to be able to meet them virtually. I hope this special treat made remote school a bit more interesting for the third graders, who have really been stupendous students all week. Excited to see them back in school next week!

Music with Heidi

In Music class, Third Graders have learned the C, C7, Am, F, G and Dm chords! They are continuing to perfect these chords as they play Arirang, My Dog Has Fleas and the Erie Canal Song. Practice makes progress, so please remind your child to practice for 5 minutes a day. Third graders are progressing wonderfully on their ukuleles!