One big blur....

Ok, I apologize. I am out of routine and need to get back on the ball. The last week and a half have been one big blur. I swear I blink and it is a new week. With that being said. Here is an update for last week and this week so far.

Lunch and recess will be different today and on Friday as 4th grade has lunch buddies from Rockwell in the building. On Wednesday and Friday, 3rd grade will have recess first 11:15-11:45 and lunch 2nd 11:45-12:15.

Math- Last week we continued our geometry unit and talked a lot about the creation of boxes, how many cubes would it take to make an open box, how about a closed box. This required a lot of spacial awareness and helped us to learn about finding the volume of something also! :)  The last few days we have worked on defining and creating examples and non-examples of lines, line segments, angles (right, acute, and obtuse), and rays. We have also worked on what a polygon is; a closed figure, created from straight lines, and at least four angles. 

Reading-   Last week we read  Dream Wolf by Paul Goble. This story is about a Native American legend, which tells the story of two young children who wander away from their mother. When night falls, the children, cold and lost, take refuge in a cave. A friendly wolf keeps them warm and the next morning leads them home.

 

Text Talk- This week we will use  Koko's Kitten. This is a nonfiction piece about a gorilla who uses sign language named Koko and his deep love for his kitten named All Ball.  Our text talk words are: accustomed, affection, aggressive, distress, capable, and console. This will be our last text talk book for the year.   

Science- Last week we switched from talking about paleontology and fossils to geology and the study of the earth. This was a great introduction to our Earth Materials unit. However, this year seemed to take a lot longer for our "mock" rocks to dry out than in the past. I am blaming all the wet weather! :) I finally brought them to school and placed them on the heater in the teacher's workroom.

To fill the time, the class had a chance to make salt dough and use a variety of toys (dinosaurs, animals, trees, etc.) to create an imprint fossil. After some time to dry, we greased the imprint and filled it with Plaster of Paris to create the fossil from the mold. The kids were very excited to crack these open today. They should be arriving home in a ziploc bag. 

We also discussed how different rocks are formed as well as the difference between a sedimentary rock, a metamorphic rock, and an igneous rock. We furthered our exploration with making some crayon rock examples. Monday for Earth Day we discussed the importance of Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling our trash. We also enjoyed some dirt cake. YUM!

Our crayon shavings for rock layers

Igneous rock- sold to a liquid to a solid

metamorphic rock- different layers with pressure and heat fuses together but you can still see the different layers.

sedimentary rock- (not a good picture) rock layers with just pressure, no heat, most fragile of rock types

Finally, today the kids got to get their hands on their mock rocks. Today we talked about the properties of a rock. The students made observations of their mock rocks (fake rocks), by its looks and smell. They created a sketch, a magnified sketch, as well as measured the diameter (across), the circumference (around), and the depth (thickness) in centimeters. Last but not least they used a scale and measured their mock rocks weight in grams. Sorry, I didn't take more pictures. There was some measuring confusion I needed to address! :) 

Tomorrow, the students will get to play geologist and break their mock rocks apart using a nail and more importantly safety goggles. They will have to use their observations from today and what they can see tomorrow to determine what a mock rock is made out of. I have a feeling after a few more experiments, they will want or need to add more ingredients to our list.

 

Writing- Last week we started our poetry unit as April is "National Poetry Month." We started off with some poems where you filled in the blanks and are now creating our own poetry while learning about new types of poetry and new vocabulary poetry can involve. The students are already amazed with the different kind of poetry. Just wait till they continue to watch our list grow throughout the rest of the month.  Students have their own poetry folder they have designed. Each day we collect our poems and add them to their folders. They will be arriving home at the end of the month.

Upcoming dates:  
 4/24 & 4/25 Book Club after school till 4

4/25 4th grade informance 

4/25 Girls on the Run

4/30 1:30 dismissal 

5/3 I am gone at Grant Wood AEA for a PBIS coaches meeting all day- Mrs. Randall is scheduled to be here.

5/6 & 5/7 I am gone to an RTI (Response to Intervention) conference in North Liberty both days- Mrs. Randall is scheduled to be here.  These are hopefully the last days I am gone for the rest of the year! 

5/ 29 3rd grade track and field day (more details to come, I don't know much! :) )

 


Have a great week!  
Mrs. Jodie Yuska

All things April

Wow! It is hard to believe the last trimester is already half way over. I am hoping to send midterm reports home next week. The week of April 15th! :)

There has a been and will be a lot happening in our room, this sometimes means guest teachers as well changes in schedules.  So far the kids have been really good about this. 

Math- Last week we completed a review of math we learned prior to spring break. This included a review of fractions, division, and multiplication facts. We will continue to practice these skills while moving on. This week we started to discuss geometry. So far we have discussed the properties of 2d and 3d shapes. The last few days we have worked on designing open and closed boxes for cubes and determining the number and shapes of cube faces and other rectangular prisms. This helped us learn how they come together to make a whole. Today we will be working on the same concepts with triangular pyramids. 

Reading-   Last week we  read Storm in the Night by Mary Stolz. This story is about a grandson named Thomas who listens to his grandfather tell a tale about a storm that occurred when he was a boy. As he listens, Thomas begins to overcome his fear of the thunderous night while realizing that fear is a natural response.  This week we took our unit test and used reading time to work on our Text Talk vocabulary. 

Text Talk- This week we read  Angel Child, Dragon Child. Book Summary from Scholastic: Ut, a Vietnamese girl attending school in the United States, is lonely for her mother left behind in Vietnam. She has difficulty adjusting to her new life, and her classmates do not accept her because she is different. Then she makes a new friend who presents her with a wonderful gift. A heartfelt, gentle, and realistic story. Our text talk words are: tilted, tender, yearn, gleam, mumbling, and cooperative.  

Science- Last week the students chose a country and did a small research project. They created brochures with travel information, which they presented to the class. 

 

 

This week we have been learning a lot about fossils. I love when I learn new information too! :) With our trip to the fossil gorge tomorrow, we have been learning a lot about paleontology (the study of things living long ago) and what a paleontologist (a person who digs and researches things found in sedimentary rock levels) may do and use. 

 

  
 

Writing- Last week we wrote "Cloudy with a chance of..." stories either by ourselves or in a small group. We took the time to edit our writing and word process them on the mobile lab cart. We took time to write a quick story about if you dug up a dinosaur bone using a t-chart to pre-write. We will print our cloudy stories, illustrate them, and share them with the class.  

Upcoming this month:  
4/12 Field Trip to Coralville
4/15 Pictures and/ or picture DUE
4/19 I will be gone to attend my daughter's Kindergarten Roundup- Mr. Shaffer is scheduled to be in our room.
4/19 LAST day to turn in Book Club signup sheets
Other than that, I believe there is just a continuation of Good News Club and Girls on the Run.  


Have a great week!  
Mrs. Jodie Yuska

Iowa Assessment Week

Just a reminder, we are taking Iowa Assessments all week, please talk to your child about trying their best. Ways to help your child get ready for the assessments are 1) to get a good night sleep, 2) eat a nutritious breakfast, 3) dress comfortable (our room does tend to get very warm). 

Yesterday, they did AWESOME! I could tell they were trying very hard. Some were getting frustrated and some thought the test was fun. We shall see what the rest of the week holds for us! :)

Since I am running late, I am combining our work for last week and this week. I will post again if something else comes up during the week! :) 

Math- Last week we discussed division. We we have practiced dividing by 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. We will continue to practice these facts as well as practice multiplication facts this week. Monday we discussed dividing with a remainder. Today we are going to practice how to solve some larger multiplication facts then go into creating fact families for multiplication and division.

Reading-   Last week we read  Tornado Alert by Franklyn M. Branley. This is a nonfiction piece about the dangers and destruction that comes with tornado season. The students are always amazed to learn that Iowa is part of the “Tornado Alley,” and how they can be catastrophic. Students will discuss the main ideas and supporting details of the story.We will not have a basal story and story quiz this week. 

Text Talk- This week we will use text talk in place of our basal story. Our text talk book is Dear Mrs. LaRue by Mark Teague. This story is written from the dog's perspective of an event versus how the newspaper reported it happened. Words we will work on are: despair, obedience, melodramatic, misconception, neglected, and persistent. We will hopefully also find time to read  The Cow Who Wouldn't Come Down again. Our text talk words will be different from our reading vocabulary words. So the kids will get a double dose of vocabulary from this text. Our text talk words are: contrary, glide, ignored, sternly, innovative, and rivals.
 
  Science- The students are finishing up talking about sound. Last week and this week we finished our experiments talking about sound moving though air (gas), string (solid), and water.  A study guide will be filled out on Wednesday and sent home. Our unit test will be on Monday, March 18th. I have placed a copy of it below if it does not make it home.

Sound through air (using tuning forks, megaphones, our voices, and cylinder tubes)

 

Sound through string (using cup telephones, and our voices)

We even attempted to create 4-way calling. :)

 

Sound through water (using buckets, stethoscopes, tuning forks, our fingers, and our voices)

 

Our Physics of Sound study guide

 

Writing- We will continue our work in our ABC books. Our reports have been written after creating a t-chart and transferring it to number notes. Students thought making the t-chart to number notes was far more complicated than taking the number notes to a 4 paragraph report! :) We will continue to work with transition words as I did not require them in our non-fiction report. During our technology time for the next couple weeks students will be typing reports and creating a 2 slide PowerPoint presentation, which will be shared at conferences. 

Upcoming this month: 
 3/12 Book Club, Choir concert 6:30, Iowa Assessments
3/13 Iowa Assessments, Book Club Meets
3/14 Iowa Assessments, Book Club, Girls on the Run  
3/15 Iowa Assessments

3/18 Science test

3/19 Spring pictures, Conferences

3/21 Early dismissal, Conferences 3/22-3/31 No School- Spring Break  
4/1- Classes back in session :)  Snow make-up day
 

Have a great week! 
Mrs. Jodie Yuska

I can't believe it is March!!!

This school year is flying by. Although, I am thrilled it is March, it just gets me that much closer to April 15th, when my house becomes a little more normal. In case you didn't know my husband is a tax accountant, and things around here get a little hectic from December 26th- April 15th. I tend to get much less time to work at home! :) Thank you for bearing with me.

Last week with the weather and Internet issues, I did not get a post out. I will try and make up for that tonight. 

Thank you to everyone who was able to support their child's music development and attend the 3rd grade music program last Thursday. I was so proud of our class, they did an amazing job on and off the risers! Way to go 3Y- you blew me away! Dancing to the Locomotion wasn't a bad way to end the performance and get everyone up and moving either. :) 

Some upcoming dates: 
March 6th- 1:30 dismissal
March 11-15th- Iowa Assessments- Please have your child get a good night sleep and eat breakfast before school. We will be working on an alternative schedule this week. 
March 19th and 21st- Student-led conferences
March 22nd- No school
March 25-29th No school- Spring Break
April 1st- Snow day make-up #2

Math-Last week we finished up our fractions unit. The week before we did a lot of work with equivalent fractions and changing fractions in to decimals to the tenths and hundredths place. As a final review we created name fractions. To do this we created each letter of our name in a 100s grid. We then turned the letter into a fraction, how many boxes are shaded/ 100 boxes. For example it may be something like 24/100, which would turn into a decimal .24. 

This week we started talking about division. We broke things back down into groups, similar to the way we started multiplication. On a multiplication problem we would say there are four groups of three things equaling 12 items. In division we switch it around there are 12 items broken into four groups which would make three equal groups. We also practiced dividing by 2's and 5's. This coming week we will continue practicing and learning our division facts as well as break them into multiplication and division fact families.

Guided Reading-   Last week all the guided reading groups in my class finished their books, which were related to the rain forest unit we have been working on. To celebrate we tried some fruits from the rain forest. Many were new to the students and they had mixed reactions. 

Star Fruit

Mango (the mystery item from Afternoon in the Amazon, part of the Magic Tree House series)

Papaya

  Reading-   This week we read one of my all-time favorite stories Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett.  This is a story where a breakfast incident with a flying pancake prompts Grandpa to tell an intriguing bedtime tale about the fantastic, faraway town of Chewandswallow, where food- not rain, sleet, or hail- falls from the sky! Students analyzed the plot, discuss cause and effects, and use the illustrations to understand the story. 

 

The week before we read  The Streets are Free by Kurusa. This story is based on a true story about hoe neighbors in a poor district in Caracas, Venezuela join together to build a much-needed playground. The children’s inspiration and the adult’s cooperation are equally important in coming up with a solution to the problem. 

 

 Writing- This week we are continuing to work on our ABC books, as well as our research projects. While students are working on their ABC books, which we have put on hold to finish up our multi-paragraph reports, I will be pulling students to start making a PowerPoint presentation to show you at their conference. Last week we finished up our reports and created a concrete poem also known as a shape poem. 

Piranha Concrete Poem

 

Science- Last week the students finished up their lessons on pitch and vibration. We experimented with Foss-uleles. Students were asked to play with the tension of the string and see how it changed the vibrations, thus changing the pitch. Afterwards each group was asked to use their knowledge to perform a song for the class. Only two brave souls decided to sing along with their foss-ulele chords. We also did a science review of frequency, amplitude, oscillation, waves, sound sources, and sound receivers. This also gave us a chance to discuss things like echolocation and how other animals without ears hear using vibrations. 

 

 

We ended the week reviewing the characteristics of the Marion Way. After discussing how respect would look, feel, sound like in our school, we created a web as a large group. After that, students were placed in groups creating their own webs which they presented to the rest of the class. They did such an amazing job!

 

We did an extra lesson with our trait of integrity, as many students could tell me the definition, but not what it would look like, what you would act like, how it would feel, or what I might see someone do who had integrity. We used the Japanese story of The Empty Pot, to guide our lesson. This offered a lot of discussion about doing the right thing, and listening to the little voice in your head called a conscience. After our discussion we filled our own pots with flowers blooming with ways to show integrity. 

 

Have a great week! Please be careful out tomorrow and Tuesday with MORE fresh snowfall! :)

Mrs. Jodie Yuska