We started the week off with a school wide open mic. Our students shared their talents and enjoyed watching others perform during this extended morning assembly last Monday. What a talented group of students we have! In Readers and Writers workshops we have been finishing our storytelling unit up by working towards a final product. We took a class rewind this week to really examine what story elements we have been learning about by examining our mentor texts and how we can apply those elements in our own writing. A lot of hard work and reflection about who we are as learners went on this week as we examined how we could improve our writing to make it the best it can be! We celebrated the 100th day of school of Wednesday this week and it was exciting! There were 100 day activities, multiplication Bingo, 100 snack mix and more! Our students were able to consider 100 in many ways from multiple angles. The most favorite activity seemed to be the 100 paper links chain, made from 100 strips of colored paper. The students worked as a group, counted out the links and assembled it and then we used their bodies to measure how long the final product was. This led to an engaging discussion of how units of measurement came to be and what the reasoning is behind having standardized units of measurement today. Last but not least we continued our multiplication work this week. We continued our math minutes daily in addition to group work and thinking about how to work through a multiplication problem when it is not one you have memorized yet. Our students were able to discuss and show all the strategies that work for them and some combine more than one strategy to find the answer. Students modeling their thinking for one another and working in small groups and pairs has been beneficial to everyone in the room! We love to see the discourse around how to solve a problem and the students coming into their own as mathematicians!
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We started the week off with a read aloud in our classroom by our school founder. She continued reading Roald Dahl's "Witches" to our class and many students are simply entranced. What a lovely way to start the week! In reader's and writer's workshops this week we are coming to the end of our unit and the discussion of story elements. we have looked for these story elements in the stories we have been reading and working hard to incorporate them into the stories we have been writing! We are so excited for the unit presentations in two weeks when we will be sharing the different artistic forms one can present a story with. This week in math workshop we continued to work with the concepts of multiplication. Students were looking for patterns in numbers, skip counting and playing multiples games this week and the understanding of the concept is growing steadily. We are looking forward to our 100th day of school celebration this coming week to help us explore multiplication further!
We started the week with a school wide celebration of Chinese New Year! 2016 is the year of the monkey. We had a lovely musical demonstration and slide show that finished with a dragon and lion performance! Students had the opportunity to play Chinese instruments and see the lion and dragon up close and personal. So exciting! The third grade had ISA testing on Tuesday and Wednesday morning this week so we were separated from 2nd grade during that time. It was a warm reunion Thursday morning! In readers and writers workshops this week students investigated the inside of a character and the outside of the character and also how to infer during reading. Students then used those new skills to enrich their own stories that we have been pulling from our heart maps. In math workshop this week students continued to work on the concepts behind multiplication. We had a special guest in the classroom to help us along in our math learning. We were so pleased to have Nina Illi join us on Thursday morning and help our students with multiplication! I think the most exciting part of the week for our students may have been the Valentine's celebration. Students enjoyed homemade treats, made crafts and gave valentines to one another. It was quite a sight! Special thanks to our AMAZING class moms Lynette O'Brien and Katie Pottinger.
We had such a full and exciting week! In our writer's workshop and as a part of our IB storytelling unit we had the chance to skype with Dr. Paul Pottinger who has climbed Mt. Everest and survived the earthquake there last year! As you can imagine, he had many stories to share and keeps his own blog to document his journeys as he climbs. It was very exciting to meet him! In reader's workshop this week we continued reading folk tales, fairy tales and tall tales by choosing books that were just right for us. Students have been noticing similarities and differences between their own book choices and other similar stories they have heard or read in the past. We are so excited to see that kind of critical thinking going on in the classroom and have heard the students discussing story elements with classmates. This week we also had a very, very special guest come to school for a class read aloud! We really enjoyed listening to the founder of our school read us "Witches" by Roald Dahl. In math workshop this week we explored the ideas behind multiplication and looked at those concepts from many angles. Students had the chance to interactively work with numbers to see how multiplication is simply repeated addition. The class worked and asked questions and showed each other the problems they had figured out. It was a great week in math workshop! During our inquiry time this week we listened to an oral story that related back to the ideas of man's earliest forms of communication through cave paintings. Students were encouraged to think of their own stories where animal's interactions with humans may have been a theme. Those stories are being developed and will be moving forward into installations in the next week!
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