We had a great week this week. Here is an update!
Reading
We have been working on building our love for reading and
the reading process. On Monday, we visited Mr. O’Keefe’s class next door to
experience their mystery reader analysis. We got to see how third graders go
about listening and dissecting how we read. A few of the important observations
we made lead us to the understanding that reading to understand is the most
important goal when we read. Of conversations and our miscues while we read
should always reflect the way in which we are make sense of the book.
For the rest of the week, we tried to always have our
notebooks out to right down some of the thoughts we had while reading and
justify our thoughts. We read some great stories with some really meaningful
messages that sparked lots of great discussion. Then, during silent reading, we
used the same idea to make meaningful observations about stories that we could
share with everyone in the class. This helped to spark some great discussions
as well.
We also began to think about who else in the class might
like the books we were reading. We created a Book Recommendation wall to make some suggestions for others in the
class. Of course we didn’t just recommend books based on 1 thing in the story
or the cover, we tried to think about what types of stories others in the class
might read and then try to match our suggestions to the reader. It became
another way to share a love of reading with others in the class.
Math
We continued our exploration into multiplication, expanding
upon our discussions about “things that come in groups” to talk about how to
package them efficiently. Essentially, we were working to partition rectangles
into Number x Number (e.g. 3x3 in the picture below) statements of groups or
arrays.
In order to give context to this, we became mathematicians
employed in a research & development department of a famous chocolatier.
They asked us to begin by working on a 9-box sample. We had to come up with a
couple of different box possibilities before settling on the best possibility
for the company.
The company then gave us our real challenge, find the
different box possibilities for chocolate boxes of 6, 12, 24, and decide which
one is the best. IN order to make our communication a bit easier, we needed to
learn how to write the dimensions of our chocolate boxes in an
easy-to-understand way, which lead us into the standard notation of
multiplication to talk about arrays, e.g. 2x3, 4x3, 12x2, etc.. Feel free to
challenge your child to find a good design for a box of chocolates at home!
Look out for those pesky prime numbers though.
We finished up the week investigating multiples. We tried to
find patterns in multiples from 1-12 using a 100s chart and a T-chart. This is
a fun way to explore relationships between numbers and to notice some pretty
remarkable patterns. For example, in a 100s chart when you color in all the
multiples of 3, you end up making diagonals or when you color in 5s you color
in columns. Some of the observations on the T-Charts were even more stellar. They
noticed that the ones place for multiples of 4s go in a set pattern of
4,8,2,6,0 which repeats infinitely.
At home I hope everyone can continue to explore multiples.
Try to play our dice game! They’ve gotten pretty good at it!
Science
We continued researching magnets and magnetism this week. We
played around with magnets, conducting experiments, making predictions, and
trying to formulate hypotheses around 2 central questions: What is a magnet,
and what makes magnets special?
To guide us on these investigations, we made recording
observations a central focus this week. We tried to always make drawings before
conducting experiments and record predictions. We went in to our trials with
the understanding that being wrong with predictions is a great thing in
science. It not only means that we learned something new and validates the
importance of investigations, it also encourages us to find out new information
and come up with new ways to explain things in the world.
One of the investigations we performed this week revolved
around magnetism. We wanted to see how many paper clips a magnet could form
into a chain or just simply pick up. We made trials with horseshoe, bar, and
circle magnets before stacking magnets on top of each other. We found out that
magnets could pick up a lot of paper clips from a pile, but they were not
really strong enough to form long chains. We also found out that if we stacked
magnets on top of each other, it resulted in a lot more paper clips picked up
from a pile but didn’t affect the results of the paper clip chain. Writing
In writing this week, we started
looking at stories with a message, launching an inquiry into theme and story
structure. Our guiding questions for our inquiry will be: When we read, what is
the author trying to teach, communicate, or suggest to us?; and, how does the author
structure the elements of a story to get to the message? These two questions
will serve as guiding ideas for the next couple weeks during writing, but this
week we just began to notice that authors are sharing more than just a
narrative in their stories.
As far as doing some writing this week, we got back into
writing fiction stories with this week working as a warm-up and reminder of
some of the fundamentals of writing for an audience. In class, everyone started
writing some fiction stories. On Thursday and Friday, we shared some of the
things we were working on throughout the week. There were lots of creative
ideas because this group is such a gifted group of authors. Sometimes, it is
just great to sit back and remember how talented they are.
At home, everyone has been working on those fundamentals I
mentioned above. They wrote some really great pieces which was awesome to see,
but we also noticed some issues with what Mr. Hass termed as CHIPS (Capitalization,
Handwriting, Indenting, Punctuation, and Substance). Each day, Mr. Hass and I
took a look at their homework to try to encourage some more deliberate
attention towards positive habit formation. We are hoping to revisit this each
week to ensure some good CHIPS habits that will ensure a great start to next
year!
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