Monday, September 28: The Thirdlanders started the week by working on their Exact Path Math test. Then we worked on illustrating our new Vocab Venture words — CAJOLE and DELUGE. Senora Coolidge taught a Spanish lesson at the end of the morning. We worked independently on our character trait bubble maps in the afternoon. We learned about germination and the needs of plants when the IU Biologists talked with our class via Teams. We made ice cream pictographs at the end of the day, sharing survey results about favorite ice cream flavors.
Wednesday, September 29: A highlight of our day was bringing our writer’s notebooks out to the garden. We sat and wrote outside this afternoon, among the pumpkins, sunflowers and tomatoes. In the morning we practiced more subtraction problems with regrouping. During Reading Workshop, we discussed the last chapter of Year of the Panda. We also discussed one of our vocabulary words—CAJOLE. We talked about parts of speech, antonyms and synonyms, suffixes, and then wrote some sentences with our word in order to practice for our quiz on Friday. I wonder if anyone has been cajoled to take a trip to an ice cream shop this week?
Thursday, October 1: Today had a sad beginning. Our wonderful class pet, Harriet the Tarantula died last night. We worked on a memory book about Harriet and talked about how much we all enjoyed her. She was 15 years old. During Math time, we worked on subtraction across zeroes. It would be terrific if Thirdlanders could practice a few of these at home. 503 – 148 = ? 600 – 287 = ? If they’re comfortable with these, they could always try out some 4 digit problems like 8008 – 2339 = ? 6000 – 1234 = ? During Reading Workshop, we practiced writing sentences with deluge. It’s important to add clues to the sentences. We also had a whole group chat about the ending of Year of the Panda. The Thirdlanders have gotten much better about finding BIG ideas in the book to talk about. We did some research reading about plants and seeds.
Friday, October 2: We wrote more of our Bloomington stories today. It was fun to get in a big circle around the room and share lines from our stories together. We also talked more about why communities have rules. We used tableau poses to act out different rights and responsibilities that citizens have. In the afternoon, we made observations about a bar graph that showed panda population change over time. We also watched a video independently about subtracting across zeroes. It was great to see the Thirdlanders going at their own paces, pausing the video to solve the problem, checking their work. We also made another character trait bubble map about Lu Yi. We decided he was a caring person and found examples of his caring personality in the book. We had a great week together.