Third Grade 12/11

Community Building

As we came back from Thanksgiving, we shared how excited we were to be back in school. We wanted to do hands-on activities, ones that we can enjoy most in the building together. After watching some Bob Ross painting videos, we felt inspired. We used watercolors and discussed Bob Ross’s techniques, his philosophy on how there are never any mistakes in art, and practiced noticing the details in our friends’ painting work. It felt great to be creative, and have new colorful artwork to put on our classroom walls!

Social studies, Reading, Writing

We have been hard at work researching, typing, and putting together our pod research books. We have reflected on why we learn about the Lenape, and how their lives are similar and different from ours today. We also talked about where there are still Lenape communities in the world, and how the land that many of us live on really belonged to the Lenape first. We have read about how the Lenape have been forced to leave their land, and how we learn about them to know what happened in history way before we were born.

As we did our research writing, we noticed something tricky. Many of us were confused with the spelling of words that sound the same, but have different spellings and meanings. To help us fix these mistakes, we learned about homophones and homonyms. We read books and identified them, did activities to fill in the blank with the correct homophone, and even made matching games for students in other pods. We are definitely becoming pros!

Over the weekend, make a home matching game of different homophones. Under the word, have your child write a sentence using it and draw a picture. Then play together and have fun!

Yahadut: Celebrating Chanukkah!

Last week students worked together in breakout rooms on Zoom to brainstorm and type what they already knew about Chanukkah.

We also watched this video to learn some new information.

This week we expanded from learning about Chanukkah to learning about other winter festivals. We read the book Lights of Winter and recorded information about all the festivals in the book.

Later this week, we zoomed in on a few of the holidays featured in the book, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Christmas, and of course, Chanukkah!

Next week we will continue to compare these holidays.

Music

This week, each third grader is honing a specific ukulele skill to share with families for their publishing party. This is an opportunity to celebrate their learning! Videos are due on Seesaw by the end of the week. We’re looking forward to sharing all of the fruits of their practice with you!

Technology/Science

Over the last two weeks, the 3rd graders have learned how to use Book Creator. Book Creator is an online program that helps students make digital books that can include videos, audio, pictures, maps, links, and text. As you may know, the students are now putting this new skill to good use in Social Studies to create Lenape books. I can’t wait to see the finished result!

This week, the third graders officially moved from the “T” to the “S” in S.T.E.A.M. That means the students have graduated from 3d grade technology boot camp and we have officially jumped into our science curriculum! We are starting with a “What is a scientist?” unit. This unit allows students to embrace their own identity as scientists. Many experiments to come!