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3rd Grade: 5/20

Play, play, play! Students have been practicing for our end of year celebration and the New York play. We are working on learning our lines, following cues, and remembering song lyrics and dance moves. It’s coming together so nicely, we can’t wait to share it with all of you!

In between practices, we completed our poetry study! Connecting poetry to our social studies unit, we examined the poem by Emma Lazarus that is on the Statue of Liberty. Students then wrote their own poem for new immigrants. After reviewing all the poems they wrote, students chose three poems to publish. Look out for an anthology of their poems! We began our last unit of writing, a personal narrative. Students were asked to think back to the beginning of the year and their first writing piece! Some remembered what they wrote about, and some needed a reminder! But the skills they learned remained as we made of list of what should be included in a personal narrative. We started simply by brainstorming and will begin writing our drafts soon!

Book clubs continue, as does our read aloud The One and Only Ivan. We’ve looked at characteristics of the main character, compared the main character to ourselves, identified a secondary character and thought about what their role was, made a prediction, and stopped to ask questions along the way. Students then practice these skills in their book clubs with the books they’re reading independently.

In Social Studies, we took a virtual tour of Ellis Island, from arrival to entry into New York. We stopped along the way in the baggage room, the Great Hall waiting room, for a medical and legal inspection, and finally to the Kissing Post! Along the way we listened to audio recordings of first hand accounts. We heard from people who had to wait on Ellis Island for three weeks while their legal documents were sorted out. We heard from someone who didn’t have the $20 required to show inspectors, and was loaned it for a $2 fee. We heard from someone whose mother wore high heels for the first time and was stopped by the medical inspectors because she was walking funny. Students gained a new perspective of the challenges people faced immigrating to America.

In math 3rd graders have finished up their unit on measurement, covering both customary units (e.g. inches, feet, ounces, pints, gallons, pounds) and the metric system (grams, meters, liters and different prefixes like mili, centi, and kilo). Did you know the metric system makes it easy to convert between the measurement of distance and volume?
In the metric system, 1 cubic centimeter of water weighs 1 gram and has a volume of 1 milliliter. To heat 1 milliliter of water 1 degree Celsius it takes 1 calorie of energy! Pretty easy, right?! In the customary units system, 1 cubic inch of water weights 0.58 oz, and has a volume of .07 cups. To calculate how much energy is needed to heat that water 1 degree Fahrenheit, you probably need a calculator and bachelors degree in science (it’s 0.036 BTUs aka British Thermal Units🤪).