A very busy and productive week!

Happy Birthday Samuel!

Week in Review- "This week we did so many things, we didn't have time to write a week in review!"- members of 3Y

Here are some of the things we did this week:
Math- This week we continued to work on place value. We talked about numbers in standard form (197), word form (one hundred ninety seven), and expanded form (100+90+7). We worked a lot with reviewing place value cubes and the importance of starting with the ones. There are a lot of students who want to add and subtract starting in the tens or hundreds place. Hopefully we can correct this as it may lead to some confusion when we need to carry or borrow numbers. Towards the end of the week, we worked on extending our thinking with brainstorming as many different number combinations as we could come up with for specific numbers. The kids caught on to patterns quickly. Every morning we begin our day with ADD (Arithmetic Developed Daily) math, this allows us to work on reviewing basic facts, concepts, and a daily story problem. 

  Reading- This week we read The Trial of Cardigan Jones by Tim Egan. 

In this story a new moose comes to town. His name is Cardigan Jones. Cardigan gets accused of stealing a pie from the window where it is cooling off.  Many witnesses claim to have seen Cardigan by the pie before it went missing, but did not actually see him eat it. However, since he was near it, he has to be guilty of taking the pie.  Cardigan admits to taking a whiff of the pie but claims his innocence. Meanwhile, he continually knocks things over with his antlers, toppling a courtroom statue, the flag, and, finally, the judge himself. It doesn't take the judge long to figure out what happened: the whole jury goes back to the open window where pieces of apple pie are splayed out over the shrubbery. "It didn't smell very good any more." We had a long discussion about it is not always best to jump to conclusions or listen to rumors. We worked on the words convince, honest, guilty, jury, murmur, pointed, stand, and trial. One of the kids' favorite parts of the week is when they are able to reread the story with a partner.

Writing- This week worked a lot on nouns and how a noun can be a person, place, thing, or an idea. I am trying something new this year. As we discuss different writing components we are going to add them to our language notebook. We will include the Common Core Standard we are covering, as well as the "I can" statement we used and some examples of what we are discussing. So far we have set up a table of contents, two pages for nouns, and a page of pronouns. (I am hoping to eventually get books like these created with the kids for reading and math.)

We had a little extra time on Thursday, when music class was cancelled so we got in a few extra cursive letters. I think this has to be the class' favorite thing. There is ALWAYS a cheer when we get a chance to pull out our cursive packets! Today, I was able to get a few pictures in. So far we have learned the lowercase a, d, g, q, c, and i. 

Science and Social Studies- This week a lot took place in science. We started our Plant Growth and Development unit! :) On Tuesday, we started by talking about what we already knew about plants. Then we took a look at a dry lima bean and recorded our observations. We placed the lima beans in water and let them soak overnight. 

Dry lima bean on top, soaked lima bean on bottom

On Wednesday, we recorded our observations about our lima bean, which soaked in water. Then we had a chance to disect our lima beans and take a look at the parts of a seed. Morgan also brought in his microscope and we were able to take a look at a dicotyledon, similar to what is found inside the bean. Thanks for sharing Morgan! 

Seed coat (protects the seed)

Inside the seed

Dicotyledon- food for the embryo

Embryo- baby plant

 Thursday- We read tbe book A Fruit Is A Suitcase For Seed by Jean Richards. The idea behind this book is that a fruit helps transplant seeds and take them to places all over the world.

We investigated some suitcases by slicing them open and having a taste testing party. :)

Our Suitcases (Fruit)

Orange

Apple

Peach

Kiwi

Pomegranate

The kids were amazed at how the pomegranate is like a heart with different chambers, and how many seeds we pulled out of one side. The picture above is after each student ate about four seeds! 

Friday- Planting day! Today, the kids were amazing. It was probably the best planting day I have had in the last nine years. Let's hope that continues to make the best plants I have seen in nine years! :) It was a lot of work, with many steps, and directions, but the class was great. We are growing Brassica Rapa plants, also known as Wisconsin Fast Plants. These plants will go through their entire life cycle in about a month. We will hopefully start to see some sprouts by Monday. :) 

Our planting materials, all ready to go!

The VERY tiny seeds we planted.

Busy little planters. 

 

 

Our quad containers, under the light in our room. We are hoping for our plants to grow big and tall!

Book orders went home on Wednesday. If you would like to order you can send the book order back to school or you can order online at https://orders.scholastic.com/GKJ69 by Wednesday, September 18th.

Upcoming dates: 
Monday, September 9th- Happy Birthday Noah! 
I will be gone in the afternoon for a meeting at Grant Wood AEA
Wednesday, September 11th- I will be gone all day for a meeting at Grant Wood AEA
Monday, September 16th- I will be gone all day

Have a great weekend! 
Mrs. Jodie Yuska