Dot and Dash

For a week, during our social studies time, we have the opportunity to work with Dot and Dash. These are programmable robots. The class is working with small groups, their robot, and an ipad in order to program the robots to finish various challenges. Today the class went through "driving school" to make sure they were familiar enough to code the robots. Tomorrow, they will begin with some pretty neat challenges! 

Check them out below in action!

Special Guest Day!

What a special day it was! It was wonderful to have all the student's special people come and spend some time in our classroom. I can see that they each have a wonderful support system!

Here is snippet of their songs from the concert. Enjoy!

Publishing our Personal Narratives

We have gone through the writing process with our narratives. The class began by choosing their seed story. They needed to make sure that they were the main character in their story. Then we created a plan. We listed our setting, people, and 4 important events. We began by drafting in our notebooks. We wrote each event long with many details and dialogue. After each event (these became our paragraphs), we stopped, dropped, and indented and began with a transitional phrase. After the students finished drafting, they edited with me. We checked for a beginning, middle, and end. I checked for spelling and also the proper use of quotation marks and paragraphes. We also checked to make sure every paragraph didn't start with THEN. That makes for a boring story! :)

Now we are busy bees, typing away to publish our first stories of the year. They have worked so hard on these and I cannot wait for them to show you the final product! 

Module 1 Wrap Up!

To wrap up our first math unit, we had a group project today in which we built our gallon person. 

The Kingdom of Gallon

The link above is a story we watched about the Kingdom of Gallon to further practice our capacity amounts.

Here are our groups in action! The class did a phenomenal job practicing teamwork and cooperation. They made sure they had a plan and that every member had a role in order to get their person finished in the allotted time frame. 

The NED Show

Today NED came to visit! NED stands for 

NEVER GIVE UP

ENCOURAGE OTHERS

always DO YOUR BEST

Please ask your child what they learned from NED tonight!

You can return the NED show yoyo purchase form to school. On Monday, sales will happen after school, if you are interested in purchasing one for your child. The profits help to pay it forward so another school gets the message from NED!

Story Problem Strategy!

Try out this strategy at home to attack story problems. It can be super tricky to figure out what is important in a story problem, but this strategy helps to highlight the important information!

Building Our Reading Stamina

We have been working very hard practicing our reading behaviors. Our goal as 3rd graders is to be able to read for 30 minutes of uninterrupted time. The 6 reading behaviors came home on the first reading unit parent sheet (yellow sheet). We are up to about 20 minutes of focused reading right now! We are also learning how to think about our reading so we understand it better. Ask your child what they wrote as their reading goal for this year.