During our theme time, we continued with our study of Shelburne's history and the Abenaki Native Americans. This week we focused on what it would be like to be settlers moving to a new land, like Shelburne. The children worked in partnerships and had to first create a list of twelve items that they could bring on their walking journey to settle in a new land. Then they had to create a diary entry, comic strip, or skit to show how they would deal with a specific challenge along the way (ex. running out of food or one of the family members getting sick). Lastly, they created a diagram of their newly settled home in Shelburne and labeled all the items they might have inside and outside of their homes. Ask your child about his or her settler "family's" home and what it looks like!
In math, we are continuing our work with multiplication. The children learned a new game called Loops and Groups in which they roll a die twice in order to create a certain number of loops and certain number of shapes in the loops. They then create a multiplication equation to match their picture. Each player takes five turns and adds up the products, or answers, to the multiplication problems. The child with the highest sum is the winner. This was a fun game and some students challenged themselves by using higher numbers on the dice! We also practiced skip-counting by threes, sixes, and nines explored how skip-counting is related to multiplication.
During Reader's Workshop, we started our nonfiction text study. We began the unit by talking about how reading fiction is different than reading nonfiction. Before reading nonfiction, we have to rev our minds! This means we should preview the text and text features and think about what the book or sections will mostly be about. We continued with our nonfiction study in writer's workshop as well. Nonfiction authors are experts about topics. These are topics they either know a lot about, care about, and can teacher others. Each child brainstormed his or her own expert list. We will use these topics to write nonfiction books during this unit!
Finally, we have been enjoying reading The Wild Robot the past few weeks and have had the chance to connect with another third grade class in Illinois. We have used a online, collaborative site called Padlet to share about our predictions and ideas about the story. Be sure to ask your child about his or her favorite part of The Wild Robot so far!
Have a great long weekend!
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