March Madness

Dear Third Graders,

      Boy we have been busy this March.  We celebrated one of our friend's birthdays.  He brought in a yummy treat and also sent us home with a goodie bag!



     We also read The Luckiest Leprechaun: A Tail-Wagging Tale of Friendship by Justine Korman. This helped to inspire us to write about "Who is worth more than gold" to us! These came out great and I can't wait for you to take them home.

 

    Mrs. Maciag also taught us about Sugaring. She shared the process she took from tapping trees to boiling the sap into maple syrup.  

     We had a great visit from author Grace Lin. She shared with us the process a book goes through from ideas to what you buy at the store! It was incredible to see how many different people and professions work on helping a book become published. 

  We got a lesson on how to make a dog!

Then we headed back to the classroom and gave it a try.  We did a great job! 

 Bear Hugs,

Crazy hair and OObleck!

Dear Third Graders,

     This week was a blast.  I was very impressed with your crazy hair on Thursday!  Here are some of the styles...

   We have been investigating solids, liquids, and gases during science.  This week, our challenge was to determine if Oobleck was a solid or a liquid! Here are some action shots. To find out more about our investigations and how to make at home, see this great site: Savvy With Science.  As you can see, we are not afraid to get a little messy!

I can't wait to see what next week has in store for us!

February Closeout!

Dear Third Graders,

    I have been enjoying hearing all about your exciting week off. We definitely had a fun time at our Valentine's Party before the break.  Here are some action shots <3 <3 <3

   Today, we celebrated a friend's birthday! She turned 9 over the break!!

   We also began our mini unit in science on Solid, Liquids, and Gases.  Today, we worked in small groups to classify pictures. We will be learning more about molecules and our states of matter over the next two weeks.

Bear Hugs!

Full "STEAM" Ahead

Dear Third Graders,

     We did a wonderful job on our Personal Narrative Writing Unit. On Friday, we had Mrs. Maurantonio's first graders come to listen to our stories. I was very impressed with how we are building stamina as author's and using different features to make our writing strong. We have been focusing on using our senses, word choice, thinking, talking, and feelings to enhance our writing. We have also be working on using correct capitalization and punctuation (now using quotation marks to show when characters are talking!).

Here are some action shots:

     On Monday, Mr. Adamo and his cream brought the STEAM bus to visit our grade level and we got to work on coding! We participated in the Maze Challenge with Sphero.  The children worked in small groups to get a ball through the maze. We had to use engineering, problem solving, teamwork, and our Growth Mindest word focus word PERSEVERANCE. We worked together to solve problems using the Sphere app on the iPad as well as taking turns with the I-Pad and how to cope when our ball didn't move exactly as we planned.

     I uploaded some videos that are located in the folder labeled "STEAMbus" on the right side of the page.  Here are some pictures:

Bear Hugs,