Four Day Week Lowdown

There will be no school on Friday for elementary students, but we'll still be having spelling and learning tons during this four day week.

Reading:  This week during reading, book clubs will continue to meet and discuss literature.  We will be focusing on asking "Thick Questions" about our readings.  We have addressed "Questioning" during our reading throughout the year.  Questioning is used to keep students engaged and thinking about their reading, but now it's time to expand on our knowledge.

Thick questions are questions that cannot be answered with just a yes or no.  Thick questions often address larger concepts and big ideas in the reading.  The answers to these types of questions cannot be found in the text, they come from one's mind.  This is a big step for us.  Students have been answering thick questions with our Junior Great Books activities, but it's a different skill set to come up with the questions.  We will be working on this skill this week and next.

Writing:  We will continue working on poetry.  We have been loving writing poems inspired by many famous poets!  We also have been incorporating Sharon Creech's Love that Dog as well.  The book is written from the point of view of a boy, Jack,who is journaling about his dislike of poetry.  Through his study of famous poems brought to him from his teacher, he finds his own poetic voice.  We're loving this story and have enjoyed comparing our poems and thoughts with Jack's.

Math:  We have delved into our study of fractions!  This can be a tricky concept for some, but our class is really enjoying learning about parts of a whole.  Last week we learned to name the parts of the fraction.  We learned that the denominator represents the total number of equal parts and right above it is the numerator that represents the part of the whole that we're discussing.  We explored fractions with shapes.  This week we are going to learn about number line fractions and equivalent fractions.

Theme:  We are "rockin' on" with our geology unit.  Last week we were on a quest for calcite!  We had  four rock samples and had to figure out which rocks had the mineral calcite in them.  Calcite is the most common mineral found in rocks and it fizzes when it comes in contact with vinegar.  Through a short series of explorations, we were able to determine which rocks had calcite.  It was a ton of fun and with all that vinegar, our classroom smelled like salad dressing all week long!

This week we will begin making volcanoes!  We will be working with the whole third grade in groups of four!  Since it's a short week, we'll probably only get through the creating part.  The eruptions will have to wait until next week!

Lastly, we were fortunate enough to have Mountain Roots come and teach us all about nutrition last week.  They taught us how to read food labels and make healthy choices and they taught us how to cook!  We kicked off our Wednesday by making yummy crepes!  They were nutritious and delicious.  We learned so much and had such a great time.  Mountain Roots will return this week for a final lesson about food and the media.

 It was amazing.  I mean, look at Jen's face!

Thank you so much for reading!

Time flies when you're having so much fun!

I can't believe that Spring Break is next week!  When we come back, there will only be seven weeks left of school!! Ahhh!!!

Thank you all for such a great Parent-Teacher Conference turn out!  We had some wonderful conversations about student growth and progress.  Another topic of conversation was the possibility of looping next year.  While this is still a possibility, there are so many variables to consider and decisions won't be made about next year until the end of this year.  One thing that is for certain is your child will be placed in the best possible environment to support his/her academic and social growth.  We'll just have to be patient and stay focused on the present.  Information about next year will be released toward the end of the summer just like always.  With that being said, we can still keep our fingers crossed!

This week in third grade:

We will be participating in two field trips this week.  The first is this Wednesday's trip to Gunnison Cattlewomen's Agventure.  Yeehaw!  We will be heading down to Gunni at 8:50 and returning around 1:00.  The weather is supposed to be sunny and in the high 50's!  Woohoo!  But, we will be down their early, so students should have layers, sunscreen, a sack lunch, and shoes that are ranch appropriate.

The second field trip is on Friday.  We'll be walking over to the CB Heritage Museum at 1:00 and returning around 2:30.

Academics are going along just swimmingly!  We are about to wrap up our multiplication and division unit just in time for Spring Break!  We are loving every minute of our poetry unit and are enjoying creating our own poems based off masters like William Blake, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams.  We just concluded our Biography unit and our presentation was FANTASTIC!

Geology is our new theme and last week we explored "mock rocks".  We talked about how rocks are made up of two or more minerals and used some pretty sophisticated techniques to break down our mock rocks.  Check out the video.  Who knew water bottles could be so useful?

After breaking down the mock rocks with our water bottles, we decided to take out the gravel and shells and set them aside.  Next, we broke it down to a fine powder and put the powder in water, shook it up, and let it all settle.  Then, we poured the water into an evaporating dish and let it sit for a few days.  We thought maybe this would help us figure out what else these mock rocks were made of.

We discovered that one of the ingredients was salt!  We took some time to explore these really cool salt crystals!  We looked at them under a magnifying glass and compared and contrasted with others.  We wrapped up by recapping and realizing that mock rocks and real rocks are both a combination of materials, not just one thing or mineral.

Last thing:  We write in our Gratitude Journals every single day at school.  With over 130 entries, we needed some new ideas and inspiration.  We found inspiration in two places and we'd like to share them with you.  The first was our new Daily Gratitude poster that gives us some helpful prompts.  Feel free to use them for yourself as well!

And the second came from photographer Louie Schwartzberg.  He is known for his time-elapsed photography and he created this 5 minute short about gratitude.  Please check it out on my post titled Gratitude.  We watched it today in class and we loved it!

Thank you so much for reading!  Have a fantastic week and a super break!

-Melissa

GRATITUDE by Louie Schwartzberg