December 11th-15th

It was so much fun to put on our snow gear and play in the snow this week! I loved seeing all the Roycemore students working together to make a snowman, or just roll around on the white ground.

Third graders began a new project this week! They are creating fiction stories about a snowman, but there is a small hitch, their snowman has to reflect a character trait that was picked out of a hat! We had fun this week learning new character traits and creating word maps. We learned how to use a thesaurus to look up synonyms and antonyms and think about people or characters that reflected the new traits. Some examples of new traits we studied were: humble, benevolent, gregarious, disgruntled, and jubilant, just to name a few.

In math, the third graders started working on array posters. They were put into teams and were given a number. They had to find all the factors of that number, cut out the arrays from graph paper, and then find the perimeter of each array. We will be evaluating our posters this week and making some comparisons.

Third graders also spent some time learning new vocabulary words important to our government unit. In teams they reviewed a variety of words and then did some activities to practice using the words. Third graders also worked on their Presidential Collector cards in social studies. They continued doing research to find at least four facts about the president they were researching. It is so fun to hear them excited about the lives of former presidents and asking such great questions.

This week students read a current events article about what species was more intelligent: cats or dogs. There was much debate, and personal preference, involved in our class discussion. We learned that brain size does not matter, but the amount of neurons in the brain. The third graders were making a lot of great connections to our ‘Mind that is Mine’ unit from the fall. It turns out that dogs have more neurons, but racoons are right there with them, even though their brain is the size of a cat! We used this reading as an opportunity to practice writing a main idea paragraph with a topic sentence and two specific examples from the text.

December 4th-8th

I’m so proud of all the hard work the third graders put into their Winter Program. It was such a fun night, and the performance was amazing! Way to go Roycemore students!

The third graders continued with their studies of the US Government. We focused again on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The third graders were also introduced to a fun project where they are going to be making President Collector cards. They are such a creative group and were very enthusiastic. The third graders jumped right into the research to learn more about some of the presidents they had heard about, or seen on our president wall. The students are using print and online books to do this research. I even heard some of the third graders creating a game they wanted to play once their cards were completed!

In reading, we are continuing to The Kid Who Ran for President by Dan Gutman. Third graders have focused on making predictions, reading aloud, looking at text structure, and answering comprehension questions. As we read, we discuss and make inferences from the text as well. The students are really enjoying the story of a twelve year old boy who is going to run for president.

In math, the students continue to study multiplication, and division, and use arrays to help them solve problems. It is really important for students to be working towards knowing their facts up through the twelves. If your child is not already, they should practice their facts every night. We also continued to work on area and perimeter word problems. These can be challenging, and we will continue to practice more word problems this week. I really loved the way the students work together and teach one another their strategies for solving these problems.

This week the students also enjoyed celebrating the Hour of Code. In class we used some time coding together while using a Minecraft themed application. It was so much fun! I loved how they worked together and helped one another out if they got stuck. If your child loves coding, look to code.org for more wonderful applications.