Happy 2014! After our vacation and two extra snow days off from school we jumped right back into learning last Monday.
In math we are learning about division. We touched on this earlier in the year, but we're back at it and taking it a bit further than we had in the beginning of the year. An emphasis of this chapter is that multiplication and division are inverse operations (although we haven't used that term...we talk about "fact families"). Students need to see that if they know the multiplication fact 6 x 8= 48, they can also work backwards to find out that 48 divided by 8 equals 6. We are also learning division with regrouping and a remainder. This is brand new learning for third graders, but they have been focused and persistent and they are doing great!
In ELA we have been reading some poetry. The students can identify stanzas and lines within a poem and use stanzas and lines as a reference to provide evidence to support their thinking about the poem. We have emphasized that when reading a poem, just like when we read any type of text, we read for meaning and need to be able to talk and write about what we've read. Be on the lookout for a new "Book in a Bag" this week, although this week it will technically be a "Poem in a Bag". In writing we are starting to immerse ourselves in biographies so that the children can write their own biographies. Each child has been given the task of finding a biography about a person they are interested in learning about and which is at an appropriate (easy) reading level for them. Before they can write a biography they need to read a biography!
This week we are starting a new science topic with a hands-on kit. We will be studying chemicals- don't worry, they aren't hazardous chemicals! The children will be performing scientific tests on various unknown chemicals and recording their observations in order to later identify the chemicals. The kids are excited to get started!
We have finished learning about Kenya in Social Studies and our next stop is Japan!
