04/13/18 Room 303 News

Weekly Updates and Reminders:

• Thank you 3rd grade students and families for participating and supporting MARCH IS READING MONTH!  Wixom students read over 150,000 minutes which means, Mr. Bender will become a kid for the day!
• GREENFIELD VILLAGE FIELD TRIP is Thursday, May 31st!  Please return the signed permission slip and $18 by May 1st.  Also, if you are interested in chaperoning please let me know by April 25th.  There is a limit to the number of chaperones we can take due to space on the bus, so let me know as soon as you can.
• A few days before Spring Break the students were getting pretty excited for a week off and they were not as focused as they usually are, so we decided to PAINT!  I seized the opportunity for this painting idea BUT incorporated how to create a Google document, change font style & size, as well as share a Google document. Below is a picture their paintings of a dandelion that's went to seed.  Students then created a one sentence Google document with the stem sentence: I WISH.  
  Wow, did they love this spur of the moment lesson and so did I!
• 

Math:
We have been so busy with Math.  Below is a picture of students working in small groups to create a poster demonstrating their understanding of multiplication strategies.  One of the Standards for Mathematical Practices is:  Attend to precision (Explain your mathematical thinking clearly and precisely).  This activity gave me an opportunity to assess students as they worked with their peers.  

 Within each math unit, there is also an opportunity for exploration of previous learned mathematical skills.  Students basically rotate to various stations practicing these skills in a new manner.  At one of the stations, the students slide a penny 10 times then graphed their numbers on our large chart using orange stickers.  We then reviewed the data and made generalizations of the graph.  Students also had a fun hands-on learning station building polygons from straws and twist ties!  Afterwards, we reviewed the properties of polygons.  These explorations are so important to student learning!  It has been a true pleasure to plan these days for our students because they are always focused, on task, and they work so well together!  

Social Studies:
This week students built log cabins out of pretzel rods, pretzel sticks and frosting!  Unlike the pioneers' work, these cabins were easy to build and really tasty!  Building a classroom family with activities like this not only makes school enjoyable but the smiles and excitement is something they will never forget!  

Science:

 Our Structures of Life learning ties nicely into the cabbage plants that were sent home this week.  This is a voluntary program.  If your child is going to participate, just remember to send me a picture of your child with their cabbage plant after 10 weeks, together with the other information such as weight of the cabbage that is mentioned on the information sheet.  Good luck to all my students on this fun opportunity to win a $1,000 scholarship!  

Word Study and Grammar:

Reading: 

Today, we enjoyed another fun pizza and slurpee lunch with our newest classmates who have completed the Reading Challenge!  CONGRATULATIONS!

For reading this week, we continue to work in our Research Clubs.  They have switched topics and are working on examining books for different text structures- compare/contrast, sequence, problem/solution, description, and cause/effect.  They are completing an organizer for each text structure.  Next week, they will work as a group to create a poster project to teach the class about their Research Animal using all five text structures.

Writing:
The students have finished up their Persuasive Writing letters.  We are going to be typing the letters next week.  This will give them great practice with typing using proper letter format. 

We also spent some time the last couple weeks doing some read alouds that have great examples of persuasion.  We have read Hey, Little Ant, I Wanna New Room, and I Wanna Iguana.

We have had fun doing some thinking routines with these stories.  In the story, I Wanna New Room, we did a Circle of Viewpoints, where you look at the story from three different character's perspectives.  

With Hey, Little Ant, we did the thinking routine Sentence-Phrase-Word to pull out the big ideas from the story. 

Next week we will be starting our final Opinion writing piece.  The students will be researching the life of a Pioneer child vs. the life of a Native American child and then writing an opinion piece about which one they think would have been more fun!  This is a great connection to what they are learning in Social Studies and will be great as we prepare for Pioneer Day.  They will write the piece first and then they will prepare a speech that we will be recording.