Third Grade Week 6

Another exciting week in the third grade classroom.  This past week we really hit single digit multiplication to number 6 and will be working on single digit multiplication to number 12 this coming week so if you are ever in the car driving, please practice those multiplication numbers.  I taught Jr. High and High School for 21 years and have seen struggle in math, simply because they never did get those math facts down fluently which will be key to success and the more success a student has the less stress they will have down the road.  Our paragraph of the week prompt was, "I am afraid of ... because of ..."

AR scores, spelling scores, and this past weeks assessment grades have been posted to Family Link.  If you are having trouble logging in.

Weekly critters.  The first one is a Child of the Earth.  After filming it I sprayed it with Raid which enraged the thing.  While it was running around in circles, I filmed the second critter, a Stick Bug.  After filming it I through it in the same container as the Child of the Earth which was still running in circles like crazy.  As soon as the stick bug landed in the container, the Child of the Earth ran over to it and in a single bite, bit it in half.  That was a really crazy thing.  I didn't expect that so I didn't have my camera out to film.  Another crazy part was a couple hours later after lunch the stick bug was in pieces and its legs were still twitching.  You can see all of this in the weekly Vlog.

This week was the first ever Weir Art lesson.  Because I have never done that before, I googled drawing projects for kids and came across Laurel Burch drawings.  I have never heard of her before, but came across a how to demonstration on drawing a cat after Burch's fashion.  Below is my drawing, and the video on how it is drawn as well as my favorite drawings from students.

In language arts this week we learned about non-fiction text features like captions, side bars, bolded text, headings, titles, informational text, informational images, and maps.  One of the non-fiction articles students helped write was an article about bullying.  As a class we had a pretty good discussion about bullying vs. teasing and taking teasing too far.  If you parents are like me, I am a big tease and we defined bullying as unwanted teasing with the intention of either emotionally or physically hurting somebody.  All students completed something like what you see below.  It was a productive discussion.

Sad news our lizard died.  Students buried it in the flower garden.  They marked it with a tombstone.  Kids are too funny.

For science this week we had an engineering project.  The competition was to build a tower, minimum of 8 inches tall out of 10 sheets of paper and 1 meter of tape, that could hold textbooks.  Students didn't think it was possible, but the winning team's tower held 15 reading books.  Great job.

This coming week will mostly be review as out district benchmarks will be taken next week to see if any of our students are struggling in any areas.  We will be working on spelling list 6, our phonics sight word list, and multiplying numbers ending in 0, like 20 times 2.

Like always, please don't hesitate to ask if you have any concerns.  As an education team, we can help these third grade students achieve educational greatness.