February 3-7 (all subjects+no excuse words)

10 No Excuse Words:

United Nations
U.N.
centimeter
cm.
sustainable
communities
goals
challenges
design
thinking

Housekeeping:

Save the Date: 
Grade 3 Celebration of Learning
Thursday, March 5th, 6-7pm (please stay tuned for an information sheet coming home soon!)

Needed:
Please send recyclable cardboard, tape, duct tape for our upcoming house-building unit!

Math:
This week we continued to examine shapes by looking at specific attributes and criteria that triangles have. Students were excited and amazed to learn about 4 different types of triangles: equilateral, isosceles, scalene and right-angle triangles.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53e7dd4fe4b0fb1fc62c318a/t/56802cf8a2bab84261f63837/1451240696607/properties-of-2D-3D-Shapes.pdf

We have been practicing to meaningfully use a ruler to measure in cm. We have also used 1cm. graph paper. This helps us to measure:
-with accuracy
-with straight lines 
-examine angles
-and think about perimeter

Please ignore the acute and obtuse triangles!
-Ask your students about the geometry notation we use to show when sides are the same or different!

Writing:
Students completed their good copies of their stories this week! It has been a very intentional process of generating creative and imaginative ideas along with editing. We can't wait to share them with you at our Celebration of Learning March 5th.

Reading:

In our individual flex reading groups during literacy block, all students have begun a focus on fluency. Research shows that reading with fluency directly impacts our understanding and comprehension of what we read. Reading fluently also asks of us readers to take the time to research new word meanings and to think about the author's purpose in writing the text.

This week we focused on pausing and pauses. Here are some of the things we discussed about reading and pausing:
When do we take a breath? 
how does our eye see phrases of words? 
What is a natural breath? 
Is it only for punctuation?

Science:

We continued to read the book, "Builder Brothers: Big Plans" as a way to examine the design thinking process. Most notably the idea of being "Empathetic" to a situation that makes you want to understand what the "Problem" is. From there we "Ideate" and come up with creative, inventive and out-of-the-box ideas to potentially solve the problem. "Prototype and Test" encourages students to build based on their ideas and then test to see if it actually solves the problem! One of the most important attributes of Design Thinking is the notion that this is a continuous process, and that most problems aren't solved the first time around.