This week we had a theme song - "Can't Stop Me Asking!" In preparation for assembly, our own Marci created a song for us. He changed the lyrics to help us show off our knowledge about our current unit. We're so proud and amazed by Marci's talent with language and music! We practiced a lot this week as we worked with the other classes to create our 'Grade 3 Musical'. While we practiced a lot, this week was not just about assembly. We are inquiring into Area & Perimeter using problem based learning. Before we defined Area & Perimeter, we were presented with the following question. As we talked out the problem, we realized the different equations we would need to answer the problem - it turns out, they were Area & Perimeter! We later used our knowledge to create our own city planning which we'll continue next week.
We also continued with our understanding of the changes on Earth and how they are connected to human survival. A fun game that helped us understand different disasters was Stop Disasters- http://www.stopdisastersgame.org/en/playgame.html **Recommended Read** Check out our Counselor's Corner Blog for an interesting perspective on technology and young learners: http://aswarsawelementary.weebly.com/counselors-corner Happy Friday!! 
In this short week, we continued with our persuasive writing by self-assessing our work. We're using a color coded system to evaluate where we are at on each of our writing skills. It takes lots of patience and a lot of rereading! In Math we practiced our speed skills in multiplication so we could surprise our parents on Friday. We also wrote out some ideas to help us teach input/output patterns to our parents. It's so different when we have to explain our thinking! Finally, we organized all our papers and did a little role playing with our friends to practice teaching our parents. When Friday came around, we were ready and we rocked it!! We were feeling good as we taught our parents about the many things we've been doing in our class. Happy Friday!!! 
**Reminders** No school for Elementary students on Monday, March 20th. Student-Led Conferences on Friday, March 24th. Grade 3 as assembly hosts on Friday, March 31st. Many thanks to Lente’s mother, Daan, for being our guest speaker on Monday. She helped us understand the importance of taking care of our Earth and also gave us examples of how consumers and companies, like Unilever, can make a huge impact. We now know of many different symbols to look for on our packaging and we also know of daily changes that we can make now that will help conserve resources. Some ideas include: turning the water off the water while we brush our teeth, taking shorter showers, and bringing bags with us shopping so we don’t have to take plastic bags.
In our literacy work, we began another opinion writing – this time we have to persuade Ms. D which technology application we should use for our final project! Ms. Mackenty came to talk to us about different kinds of hooks we can use to get our reader’s attention. We also had some practice ‘banishing boring words’ as we came up with synonyms for some of our overly used words such as good, bad, said, and nice. With our reading, we’ve been working on understanding character traits by looking at the character’s words, actions, and reactions. We’re learning to differentiate that character traits, like their personality, are qualities that don’t really change, while passing feelings do. With our unit of inquiry into ‘How the World Works’, we practiced our brainstorming skills and group work. We had to come up with ways to protect a city from from a landslide and also ways to prevent a landslide. We continued our talk about Earth’s changes and how those changes effect humans. To begin an understanding of survival, we explored Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to inquire into the basic needs of humans as well as how we build up our social, emotional, and self-actualization needs. Happy Friday!!! 
Many thanks to our amazing room parents for the birthday surprise! Thank you for remembering our holiday birthdays and for the beautiful collage of student work - we will treasure them for years! Thank you!!
 This week we continued with our opinion writing by editing, peer reviewing each other, and then a self-reflection. Our work is very persuasive with lots of hooks, descriptive writing, and excellent examples to support our reasons. We look forward to posting them on our blogs next week. Wednesday, we joined the International Women’s Day celebration by talking about the important women in our lives, learning about the historic struggles of women, and celebrating the many contributions of important women throughout history and around the world. In Math we used our knowledge of maps, charts, and grids to analyze data about volcanic eruptions. After plotting the locations of eruptions we looked for patterns and found the Ring of Fire, as well as other patterns that helped us to identify the boundaries of the plates within the surface of the Earth. We continued the discussion about the different kinds of changes that occur on Earth because of the movement between plates. We explored new technology tools this week by checking out the many features of the Explain Everything app. Using our knowledge of Earth’s form and the many changes that occur, we explored the many features of the app and created our first Explain Everything video. On Thursday, we visited our Reading Buddies in Grade 1 and had lots of fun sharing about our unit. Happy Friday!!! 
Reminder! This weekend is the Warsaw Mineral Expo; it’s a great opportunity for learning connected to our current unit.
This week we began to hone our research skills by using our knowledge of non-fiction text features to pull out important information. We then took that information and synthesized it into a Google Slide presentation. When working in groups we practiced our communication skills by listening to others, being open-minded to new ideas, and taking on different group roles. Check out our blogs for our final product about Earth’s rocks, minerals, and form. We also began to formulate our opinions using the OREO model – Opinion, reason, example, opinion restated. Using the writing process, we enhanced our writing with transition words and powerful sentence starters. We also worked with a partner to check that we had clear and compelling reasons that were supported with examples. In Math, we continued our work with the Distributive property of multiplication by working with cards and dice to create our own numbers and solve the new equations with our four-step process. We also realized that we are masters at spotting patterns!! We can find the skip counting or multiple patterns in word problems and number representation. Finally, we joined our Reading Buddies in 1M and practiced our partner reading and questioning. Happy Friday!!!  |
