Words Come Alive With Weather

This week we collaborated with the Flynn Theater to provide a "Words Come Alive" experience for our third graders.  The theme for this hour of dramatic activities was weather, and this was a wonderful way to "kick off" our Weather Unit.  We discussed various natural disasters that are related to weather.  Some of these included tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts and blizzards.  We brainstormed adjectives that we could use to describe each of these and ideas to keep ourselves safe during these kinds of events.  We then took on the role of each of these natural disasters and used our bodies to move the way each of these disasters would move.  Next week we will enjoy another opportunity to participate in "Words Come Alive" and will continue our learning about weather by making connections between weather and fairy tale characters.  Ask your child to share how he/she would use his/her body to show a natural disaster.

We also enjoyed another wonderful Hands On Nature lesson this week.  This month's focus was rocks.  We enjoyed a play, and explored igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks and learned about the characteristics of each kind of rock.  We also pressed shells into clay to explore the ways fossils are formed.  Finally, we worked in groups to create rock sculptures or go on a rock search in our school yard.  A big thank you to our Hands On Nature parents for providing this terrific learning opportunity for Esprit students.

This week we finished our second unit of study in math and we will begin our third unit on Monday.  This unit will focus on multi-digit addition and subtraction.  Students will have opportunities to review and extend their thinking about place value, practice multi-digit addition and subtraction, and will be solving 2-step story problems and equations.  They will be rounding to the nearest ten and hundred, and will be working with a wide variety of invented algorithms as well as the standard algorithm for adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers.

Our non-fiction units in both Reader's and Writer's Workshops will continue through the month of December.  We are currently learning about writing introductions and conclusions in Writer's Workshop and will be using that learning to write our own introductions and conclusions in our own pieces of writing.  Ask your child what makes a good "hook" in an introduction.  During Reader's Workshop, we continue to learn about and practice strategies good readers use to understand non-fiction text.  This week we practiced determining the main idea and finding topic sentences when reading.  We are connecting and using many of the strategies we are learning in Reader's Workshop to our writing during Writer's Workshop.
We finished reading The Year of Billy Miller this week, and will begin a new read aloud next week. We have enjoyed connecting with another class and sharing our ideas and thoughts about this book online in a variety of ways.

 Lastly, we are still in need of volunteers to help at our table for the SCS Holiday Craft Fair.  An email went out to all families this week to share a google doc sign-up.  If you are available to help out at this event, please visit the google doc and sign up for a time that works well for you.  We will be selling our soap balls and soap dishes we created at the Shelburne Craft School, and look forward to this fun community event.

Happy weekend!