Second Week of October

Hello everyone,

Our second week of October has flown by!  It may have been a short week but it was a busy one for all of us in 3D!

We have begun our Golden Eagle presentations and we are learning so much about one another!  What a wonderful chance for every student to highlight their strengths and interests outside of school!


We also use these presentations to help us with some of our in school learning goals of course.  The students have developed a class checklist about how to be the best audience they can be, focused on listening skills while their friends present and how to ask for further information or clarification when they are finished.  We then use this information to create jot notes on a mind map.  Next we participate in shared writing as we generate a series of paragraphs about the presentation we have seen.

This shared writing provides a number of wonderful opportunities to discuss and practice word choice, sentence structure and paragraphing which students are then able to try applying in their own writing.



We have started to generate our spelling lists from words that we have identified as difficult from our writing or new and interesting from our reading.  This coming week the students will be choosing words that should be recorded in their agenda for practice purposes.  Some activities that students might choose to complete to help them to practice spelling these words correctly are:  using them in their own sentences; writing them out on papers and then putting them back together as a puzzle; read-cover-write-check and repeat; putting them in alphabetical order; looking for small words inside larger words; clapping out the number of syllables; etc.

In math this week we have been continuing to solve a series of problems based on "Grandma Eudora's T-Shirt Factory".  All of the related problems and activities focus on developing students' understanding of place value, relationships between numbers, addition and subtraction.

We had so much fun with this that I was asked by K.N. to post a new number string here for students to work on with those of you at home.

It is important to remember that when working through a number string that it is all about representing the ideas many ways and looking for connections between the numbers.  In the photograph below each of the number sentences was presented and discussed one at a time. When the second number sentence was introduced the students thought about how what they had done with the first number sentence might help them with the second, and then again with the third.


 If you want to try a series at home here is an example:

56 + 43  How many ways can you represent this number sentence?

60 + 40  How many ways can you represent this number sentence?
              Do you see any connections between this number sentence
              and the one above?  Could one of them help you to solve
              the other?

50 + 50  How many ways can you represent this number sentence?
              Do you see any connections between this number sentence
              and the ones above?  Could any of them help you to solve
              the others?







In science we have continued to build our knowledge of the parts of a plant and the purpose of those parts. We will be making focused observations about the different parts' purposes this week, as well as exploring the soil they grow in.

Our art is growing out of our plant studies as we examine the world around us for different kinds of lines. Hopefully some of you will have had an opportunity to help your child find various leaf samples for us to examine this week.

I am looking forward to another wonderful week of learning ahead!

Ms. Sparling