I am so excited for cooler weather!

This week we celebrated Noah's birthday! Happy Golden Birthday Noah! :) 

The cooler weather make me think fall. This is my favorite season of all, cool morning and evenings, not usually 100 degrees, apples, changing colors, a lot of birthdays and FOOTBALL. Speaking of GO CYCLONES! OK, I had to sneak that in, even if you cheer for a different team. Please keep reading! :) 

Here are some of the things we did this week:
Math- This week we played a couple games to put our place value work into practice. The kids loved the game "Close to 100" where students were paired up and had to draw six cards. From there they chose four cards to turn into two 2-digit numbers for them to add together and see who could get their number combination closest to 100. We have also worked a lot with rounding to the nearest 10 and the nearest 100. The kids seemed to catch on the the nearest 10 quickly. To the nearest 100, needed a few more examples. It wasn't until I started to use real life examples that I saw some light bulbs going off. :) For example, if there are fire departments every one hundred yards, so there is a fire department at address 300 and a fire department at address 400. My house is on fire at address 378, to which fire department would I run or should arrive first. We are ending the week with taking our knowledge of rounding to the next step my estimating addition problems. When we estimate, we round then add. For example. 38+54, would round to 40+50=90

  Reading- This week we read Destiny's Gift by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley. 

I this story a girl named Destiny loves the small bookstore in her town. She also finds a great friend in the owner, Mrs. Wade. She lets Destiny's help her in the store and they often read and look up the meaning of words together. One day when Destiny goes to the store the owner Mrs. Wade is sad. She was reading a letter and tells Destiny that the store might have to close because the store doesn't make enough money to pay the new price rent.The entire town comes together to try and raise money for the store. In addition, Destiny gives Mrs. Wade the gift of words, written in her journal, about the love of the store.

Here is a link I found for the audio part for our reading stories.

http://www-k6.thinkcentral.com/content/hsp/reading/journeys2014/na/gr3/ese_9780547894515_/vol1/launch.html

Note this link will take you to the cover of the book, just click the arrow or enter in the page number that you want the book to read. The only down fall is after every page you have to hit play again.

Writing- This week we looked at a lot of examples of narrative writing. Today we started planning our narrative writing piece, which of course got me off topic and sharing lots of stories. :) The kids didn't seem to mind at all. We will continue writing a narrative sample next week. 

Science and Social Studies- A lot has changed with our plants already. I came in over last weekend (as I do most weekends, with the need to leave earlier this year to meet Katy at her bus stop) and was pleasantly surprised our plants had already sprouted. 

On Tuesday, I helped the kids thin and transplant their plants. We planted extra seeds in each, just in case some seeds decided not to grow. When more than one plant grows in each quad, we thin, or take one plant out. This way each plant can have some room to grow. I transplanted a plant we took out into any quad to had a plant not grow.

Caden's plants before thinning

Caden's plants after thinning

A pile of all the plants, which were thinned out

Look how long the roots are already!

It is hard to see, but at the end of the stem, the seed coat is still attached to the plant.

Here are our plants after 7 days of growth. Quite a difference! The kids were also interested and asked a lot about what the plants will look like through out their life cycle, so I am attaching a short time lapse video about the life cycle of the plants (Brasica Rapa, Wisconsin Fast Plants) we are growing.

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 16th- I will be gone all day

Have a great weekend! 
Mrs. Jodie Yuska