Thank you parents for all of your help in creating a really nice Holiday Celebration for the kids. Things ran really smoothly and it great that the kids will have two terrific keepsakes going forward.
Today we did a little more work with the computer science standards. We used Makey Makeys to help us get ready for Scratch coding. We used Spheros to help reinforce our understanding of block coding.
The Nevada Computer Science standards are relatively new as is having all students take at least a 1/2 credit of computer science when they get to high school. We’ll continue to explore these outcomes to better prepare the students for what is next in their academic careers.
We completed our Enchanted Lands project this week and the final pieces are terrific. We first explored the idea of background, midground, and foreground through classic pieces of art. Then we played a game in which students drew images matched to magical elements, they identified.
Their understanding was then leveraged to create art that included painting a setting and collaging. (Incidentally, thanks for all of the magazines!)
Students shared five pieces of candy, from their Halloween trick-or-treating, and created scaled bar graphs with it. In this case students identified categories for their x-axis and an interval of 2 to 5 for their y-axis. Lots of learning and lots of fun.
We had a great Halloween Celebration! Thank you parents and the planning committee for putting together such an engaging afternoon.
Admittedly, we squeezed in a full five hours of instruction, into just four hours; but it allowed us to be fully ready for a pumpkin relay race, pumpkin decorating, craft creating, and a couple of games of Kahoot.
Oh, and thank you “Mr. Grossman” for taking over so many of the instructional duties.
We completed our first Pro Se Court of the school year. Our judges had to adjudicate whether gum should or should not be allowed in schools. My favorite part is the terrific writing student produce, having rehearsed with the evidence.
The weather was much better than expected and this helped create a really nice field trip experience for the students.
Our focus was on finding arthropods and learning more about these invertebrates. Students shook trees, lifted rocks, dug holes and enlisted parent chaperones in their search. Consequently, they found insects, arachnids, myriapods, and crustaceans.
Thanks parents for the help and the photos!
It took several lessons but students finished their comic book covers. To get us there we studied several classic pieces of art through an instructional approach titled “careful observation.” We learned about silhouettes, types of shapes and lines, and the importance of have a backstory before drawing.
Students also learned different strategies for using water colors. This culminated in what you see below: a lot of great art!
An important part of 3rd grade is understanding what a habitat is and what organisms need to survive well. To help with this, we visited the Oxbow Nature Study Area and, with the help of Sierra Nevada Journeys, moved through the park to work towards these outcomes. (Thanks parents for sharing pictures that I could post to the blog!)
It was a great first week of the 2019-2020 school year. We managed to get a lot done including establishing a number of important routines and navigating a lot of challenging content. We started our work with multiplication and division, described part of the scientific process, learned how to participate in a Readers Workshop and Writers Workshop, and did our first art lesson. Below, the highlights.
Room 360 