March 5 - 9

We had another busy week in 3A. The students are working hard in class to prepare for the Spell-a-thon test coming up next week. Please remember to get your child's pledges in on Monday, March 12th and to support your child in studying their words.

Curriculum Update

Writing Workshop

The students really enjoy their journal writing time on Mondays.

This week the students wrote their third All About Me paragraphs.

  This week we read The Luckiest Leprechaun by Justine Korman. When a leprechaun reluctantly lets a dog befriend him, he finds out what it's like to care about someone. We used this book as a mentor test to help us generate ideas for writing Irish Limericks.

Limericks are short and witty poems.

•It is often believed that the limerick was invented in the 1700’s by soldiers returning from France to the Irish town of Limerick.

•Limericks are generally meant to be humorous.

•Limericks have 5 lines.

•The rhyme and rhythm of a limerick helps it read as a light-hearted poem.

•In lines 1,2, and 5 –the last words rhyme.

•In lines 3 and 4 –the last words rhyme (but not with lines 1, 2, and 5)

The students completed the rough drafts of their limericks and will finish the next week in time for Student Led Conferences.

Word Study

We began our week with writing a pre-test in preparation of the Spell-a-thon. The purpose of the pre-test was to better focus the students on the words they need to study for the test. Please remember that the Spell-a-thon test is on Wednesday, March 14th.

  

Each day we focused on 10 of the 50 spell-a-thon words and did an activity to practice these words. Some of these activities included:

Partner Spelling

Spelling Scrabble

Pyramid Words

Fancy Words

Reading Workshop

We continued our guided reading of The Mouse and the Motorcycle this week.

Keyboarding Skills

The students were introduced to Typing Club to help with their Keyboarding Skills.

Math

This week we focused on the following goals in math:

- connect skip counting forwards to repeated addition.
- practice skip counting forwards by 5s and 10s and dentify patterns in the skip counting.
- add by skip counting by 5s.
- skip counting by 3s and will identify patterns in skip counting.
- identify the number they skip count by and fill in numbers in sequences of skip counting by 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, and 10s.
- identify mistakes in sequences of skip counting forwards by 3s.

Science

Survivor Challenge: Great job building the backpacks out of tree bark!  While searching for food, Ethan came across a source of fresh drinking water. Essence and Isaac decided to head back to the plane to find containers to store the fresh water in.  However, the fresh water supply is limited , so we need to test the bottles to determine which will be the best to store our water safely.  The shape of the container will affect its stability.

Testable Question:  Will all shapes of containers be equally stable?

Using four different shapes and sizes of containers, the students tested which would be the most stable.  The students discovered that the size of the base affects the stability of the container.  As well the taller the container is the wider the base needs to be for stability.

We also tested the strength of difference methods of joining. The first challenge the students faced was to answer the testable question "Will straw cubes, joined with different connectors, support the same mass?" The connectors used to answer this question were paper clips, pipe cleaners and plasticine. The students concluded that cubes joined with plasticine where stronger and held more mass that those made with paper clips or pipe cleaners.

Building Bridges with Mr. Caron

The students really enjoyed their Building Bridges Workshop with Mr. Caron. They had the opportunity to assembly four bridge types which included the arch, beam, cantilever and suspension bridges. A big thank you to our parent volunteers who helped out with the workshop!

PE

The students enjoyed playing floor hockey games during PE this week.

Special Art Project with Mrs. Angell

Thank you to Mrs. Angell, an instructional coach from Blackgold, for coming in to do a special art project with the kids. Using a website called Twisted Wave, the students took a screen shot of the sound waves created by saying their names. The students inserted the screen shots of their sound waves into a program called Pixlr. Then they were asked to write their names below the sound waves and insert backgrounds of their choice. The students' "sound wave art" is now on display in our classroom.

Art

The students each made a "Pot of Gold" in art on Friday. The good copies of their Irish Limericks will be glued onto the "Pot of Gold" and put on display next week.

 I hope everyone has a great weekend! Don't forget that Sunday is Daylight Savings and to set your clocks one hour ahead.