Third Grade Blogger

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... Read More

Reading We are still getting used to book clubs and working independently. Each time book clubs meet, students are reading chapters and answering questions or looking at new vocabulary words. This week, we’re focusing on the characteristics of the main character. We have been having great conversations about what we know about the character based on what they say and do. Writing We continued to finalize our biographies. This week we talked about paragraphs and how to organize a paragraph. They usually start with an introduction or what the paragraph is about. Then there are supporting details and examples. When... Read More

We hope you all had an enjoyable break! Reading: Before break we finished reading Because of Winn Dixie and started watching the movie. The kids were excited to see this story on screen and kept comparing it to the book, often shouting, “That is not how I pictured it!” Afterwards we read Dyamond Daniel and compared Dyamonde to Opal. They both moved to new places and were looking for friends. Dyamonde was nice to everyone, even Free who wasn’t nice to her, and looking for friends her own age. Opal did not want to be friends with the Dewberry boys as they... Read More

Reading We continued reading Because of Winn Dixie, analyzing how Opal reacts to problems that she faces. We’ve noticed that Opal faces them head-on, making her very brave. She asks the preacher about her mother, even though she is afraid to, and always talks back to the Dewberry boys. We then looked at different supportive characters, Gloria Dump, Miss Franny, and Amanda Wilkinson. We established that their roles are as advisor, friend, and challenger. These supporting characters help our main character move along their story mountain. Sometimes they make their journey easier, and sometimes they make it more difficult. We then... Read More

Reading: We are continuing to read Because of Winn-DIxie and learning all about the main character, Opal. We thought that she had a big heart for animals because she rescued Winn-Dixie, but we realized that it extended to people too when she asked Miss Franny to be her friend. We dug deeper into her personality to theorize why Opal is like this. We thought it might be because she’s lonely after moving to a new town and not having any friends. The thing she wants the most is to have friends. We then used our knowledge about Opal to make predictions... Read More

Welcome back to school! We hope you had a wonderful and restful break! Reading We started a new book, Because of Winn Dixie. We will be focusing on the characters. To start, we notice what our main character, Opal, does and says. We think about what that tells about her character and personality. So far we’ve notice that Opal loves animals and her father, the preacher. She looks out for those less fortunate than her. She is kind and brave. Writing We began our new writing unit, opinion writing. We all know this class is full of opinions! To start we... Read More

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!... Read More

We have had a busy past few weeks! Judaics- Celebrating Chanukah! We had a full week of celebrating Chanukkah in third grade! From classroom lighting, to leading the school in lighting on Thursday, third graders were active celebrants. In Judaics class we learned not only about Chanukkah, but also about additional winter light festivals from other cultures. On Thursday we had a virtual field trip with the Jewish Museum where we saw examples of varied types of chanukiyot as well as artifacts from other cultures, such as a diya used during the Hindu holiday of Diwali and a kinara used... Read More

Reading, Writing, and Social Studies: Our three disciplines have merged these past two weeks as we began working on our Lenape projects. We started by looking at non-fiction books and some of the features. We noticed tables of contents, indexes, glossaries, fact boxes, pictures, diagrams, and more. We then focused on how to takes notes and “learn” from non-fiction text. The first thing we do is find the main idea of the passage. Then we can look for the details that support that main idea. When we write this down, we call it boxes and bullets. The main idea and... Read More

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... Read More