A Busy Week!

This week the Esprit Team walked to the Shelburne Craft School to create crafts for the upcoming SCS Holiday Craft Fair.  We rolled pieces of soap into soap balls and created soap dishes to hold them.  We were able to participate in the process of creating soap dishes from beginning to end.  We rolled the clay out using their big rolling machine and then experimented with textures.  We then each created a textured soap dish using a slap of clay and used glaze to paint our soap dishes different colors.  We are very eager to see what our soap dishes look like after they are fired in the kiln.  Many thanks to Sarah Ahrens for making this experience possible for us! The PTO Holiday Craft Fair will be held on December 5th from 9:30-1:30pm.  We will be sending out an email in November looking for volunteers to run our table that day.

This afternoon we participated in Mix It Up Day.  This is an opportunity for cross-grade collaboration and community building at SCS.  Deb's class mixed up with the Winton House middle school students and had fun learning about drums and doing some drumming with their middle school partners.  Mr. Buckingham, our Middle School Instrumental Music teacher provided this experience for us.  A big thank you to Mr. Buckingham.  Miss Niles' class mixed it up with Mr. Brunvand's middle school students.  We challenged each other to a mancala tournament.  It was so much fun to watch middle school students and third graders strategize together!

We finished our Forces and Motion Unit during Science this week with an Engineering component that allowed us to use our learning to problem solve and create rolling carts.  Each group of 5 students was given 30 minutes and a bucket of materials to create a cart that could roll when pushed or pulled.  On the second day of this task, each group was asked to improve upon their cart to see if they could get it to roll farther than the day before.  Group work can be very challenging at this age, but all groups worked hard to share ideas, collaborate, and produce a final product.  Be sure to ask your child about his or her cart.  Did it roll? How many centimeters did it go and what features allowed the cart to travel a far distance?

In both Reader's Workshop and Writer's Workshop, we started an informational text (non-fiction) unit.  In reading we explored the text features in informational text, such as headings, charts, graphs, maps, labels, diagrams, captions, and glossaries.  After finding these in many non-fiction books in our room, we wrote about the purpose of those features.  As you read informational text with your child at home, see if he or she can identify a text feature and tell you why the author used that feature.  In writing, we looked at different ways to structure our non-fiction writing and learned that this can affect how we think about our topics. For example, the children were asked to take their topic and think about pros and cons, comparing and contrasting, and cause and effect.  Several students are writing about dogs and thought about how they could structure their writing in different ways: pros and cons of having a dog as a pet, comparing and contrasting dogs with cats, or even writing about problems there may be with dogs and how those problems could be solved.  After thinking about these different structures, the children began to write!  We continue to encourage building stamina in our writing:  writing long and strong!  Ask your child this weekend about his or her non-fiction topic.  How is your child going to structure his or her paragraphs?




In math, we continue to focus on multiplication and looking at new ways of seeing multiplication.  We have explored drawing a picture, using repeated addition, using facts you already know, and skip counting as ways to see multiplication.  This week we were introduced to a ratio table.  A ratio table is a model that encourages the children to explore proportional thinking.  For example, if a 1 pound of rabbit food costs $1.50, how much would two or three pounds cost?  We also explored a multiplication table and the relationships between the facts.

Lastly, please remind your child to turn in his or her reading log on Monday.  Children who have met the reading goal will be invited to a literary lunch in the near future.  Happy Weekend!