Happy New Year!

I hope all our families had a wonderful and restful Winter Break.  It felt good to have 2 weeks off, but it also felt good to get back to the routine of school.  The kids all came back eager to dive back into our work.

To start off the year, we began creating a time capsule to remember 2015.  We talked about time capsules, and watched video of the latest time capsule just opened in Boston.  We made several artifacts to go in them.

Here we are cutting string to match out height.  Of course, we had to find out how tall we are in inches!

We also recorded some of the things that we like right now....favorite TV shows, etc.

We were very lucky to have a parent donate empty coffee cans that will hold our time capsules.  Right now, we are working on decorating the outside of them.  I will post pictures of that later!

We also have been using our Chromebooks more in class.  This week, we used them to learn some vocabulary words relating to our study of the human body.  We wanted to make sure we knew some key words before we started reading our informational articles.

I usually don't post much about our 3rd Grade math class.  But, this week, the students did some really wonderful work around multiplication.  They made posters reflecting equal groups of objects.  I will try to post some pictures of the 2nd Graders in math class (from Ms. Dar).

This week we received 2 wonderful gifts.  One of student's grandparent brought in some back issues of Highlights.  The kids LOVED them!

Also, another grandparent gifted our class with a subscription from Ranger Rick.  Our first issue came this week.  Here we are reading about the kinds of new year resolutions an animal might make. 

In spelling, we started doing something a bit new.  We have studied different spelling patterns and different ways to spell sounds.  This week, we started a program called "Making Words."  Students use a collection of letters and try to build as many words as they can.  There is always one word that uses all the letters.  This was our first week, and the kids did a very good job.  From this master list of words that the students can use to select their list of spelling words.

Sorry these are upside down.  These groups found the BIG word....computer.

We have also started "No Excuses" January, in terms of writing complete, correctly punctuated sentences.  This is something that we talked about may times over the past few months.  We will still practice, but we have talked about 2nd and 3rd Graders always use capital letters and punctuation when they write.....ALWAYS!

This week we also explored informational articles about the human skeleton.  I introduced the kids to "Tabletop Twitter."  We talked about how when we read something....often we want to share what we read about with other people.  We put 9 different articles on paper "walls".  The kids then read the articles, and wrote posts about what they thought.

You could also reply to someone else thinking.

We recorded questions the reading made us think of.

The kids were able to get a lot of information about the human skeleton that they will put to good use next week when we build models of bones, joints, and skeletons!