A Rollercoaster of Weather

We are starting the time of year when the weather is unpredictable. Please watch the forecast and send your child with a jacket or sweatshirt when needed. Recesses can get very breezy when the kids are out in the open.

Here are some of the things we did this week: 
 
Math- This week we were ahead of the other 3rd grade classes in math so we took a step back to review place value and how to add 2-digit numbers. The kids are using a lot of "inventive" math, which I know was strongly pushed in 2nd grade. This year, we are working a lot on solving a standard algorithm.  This includes, lining up our numbers vertically, starting in the ones place, then moving to the tens place. Next we will we move on to the hundreds place with 3-digit addition. The next few weeks we spend on 2-digit and 3-digit addition and subtraction. We have quite a few students need help practicing and memorizing their basic facts (single digit addition and subtraction 0-9). This will be very important as we continue to move through our third grade math curriculum. We will continue practicing them at school, but I would like your help with this at home also. I have created a page at the top of links to work on math facts. Basic flashcards can work wonders too though. Ideally, third graders would have these memorized as we go through our year. Otherwise when we get to multiplication and division, lessons can be rather cumbersome. :)      

Reading- This week we read Pop's Bridge by Eve Bunting. 

In this story a boy named Robert tells the story of watching his father and a thousand co-workers build the Golden Gate Bridge over the San Francisco Bay during the 1930s. He refers to the project as "Pop's Bridge" believing his father's role as an ironworker (or as called in the book a Skywalker) is more significant than those of the other workers. Robert and his friend Charlie Shu, whose dad is a painter on the bridge, watch the bridge's progress through binoculars from Fort Point. They also spend their time creating putting together a jigsaw puzzle of the design of the Golden Gate Bridge. An accident happens on the bridge leaving Robert with a new appreciation for all of the construction workers, including Charlie's dad. This helped up discuss the emphasis on team work, and how everyone is important and plays an equal part, no matter what job they complete.

Writing- This week the students wrote a story of "Mrs. Yuska is Missing," when I was absent on Monday. The rest of the week has been spent making T-charts to plan and writing a personal narrative paragraph or story. Here are some of the tools we used to help guide our writing:

T-chart to plan out our writing

What is Narrative Writing?

Going from a big topic to a specific topic

The difference of a Personal Narrative

 
Science and Social Studies- A lot has changed on our plants though out the week. Since plants change daily, we are keeping a log with the number of days since we planted, the date, an illustration, and at least 3 sentences worth of observations. We also take the time to measure our plants daily.

This week we spent a few days discussing the parts of a plant as well as each parts importance.  Look! A lot of our plants bloomed flowers today.

Today we introduced honeybees. The kids each received a freeze-dried honeybee, which they were able to take an up close and personal look at. We glued our honeybees to a toothpick to get ready to use to pollinate our plants and discuss their interdependence. We will continue talking a lot about the parts of a plant and a bee for the next few weeks.

Big ideas for science this week:
1)Plants need soil, water, and light to survive.
2) Plants are made up of roots, stems, leaves, and flowers. (Later we will take a look at the parts of a flower, too)
3) Plants, just like people grow at their own pace. But also like people, plants can have growth spurts.

When we planted our plants, we also planted a "root view" garden. The kids were very excited to see that we were starting to have some growth. We can now see tiny carrot sprouts, no onion sprouts yet, and there is a lot of growing going on underneath of our lima bean seed coat. :)

Today we had electronic time as a reward for filling our Brownie Point Tray. Yes, it is a baking tray covered in paper brownies! :) I was so impressed with the kids. Even though they each had their own piece of technology, which would make it easy to isolate themselves. They were all interactive and stilled played with each other. This is really a great group of kids!

Upcoming dates: 
Rest of September- I should be here and hopefully we will finally have "normal" weeks of school! It has been crazy that we have not had a single week yet of all 5 full days of school. 

Have a great weekend! 
Mrs. Jodie Yuska

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

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