August 18, 2017

Wow! Our first week has already come and gone! Now, it’s time for our very first class blog!

We started our week with pennants that we are working on coloring in. We’re going to hang them on the wall to celebrate our new team! Look for them at Back to School Night on August 31st at 6:00pm in Room 21!

In math, we did the Week of Inspirational math from Jo Boaler and YouCubed at Stanford. Our first activity was called Four Fours. Our job was to create the numbers 1-20 using only four fours. It got us to talk about squares, square roots, and even factorials! What a way to start third grade!

Wednesday’s challenge had to do with folding paper in specific ways. We were then challenged to prove that our solution was correct to our partners who were acting as skeptics. On Thursday, our math was spent discovering and looking for patterns in Pascal’s Triangle. We found that the pair of numbers above a square, creates the sum for the square below. We also discovered many interesting triangles inside of Pascal’s Triangle.

Today we looked at growing shapes. We discussed the different ways that people visualize the same growth. Then, we looked at the growth to see if we could identify a pattern.

On Wednesday afternoon, we did a team challenge where we built towers made out of toothpicks and mini marshmallows. The goal was to build the tallest tower that could stand alone for 30 seconds. We had towers made in square layers, some that looked like pyramids, some that got squished together, and one that was almost net-like. We learned a lot about engineering AND teamwork and communication.

We’ve also been working on the covers for our writing journals. We are covering them in all of the things we love. They’re turning out beautifully!

To kick off our Project Cornerstone for the year, we read the book, How Full is Your Bucket?. We learned how to be bucket fillers. We also worked on an illustration to show a time that someone filled our bucket.

We kicked off our PE this week. On Tuesday we had our first running program. The students are excited to earn their charms this year! Then, on Wednesday, we had our first PE class. We are doing a weekly rotation with all of the third grade.

A big topic in our class is having a Growth Mindset. If you’re not sure what that is, check out this short video. To begin that exploration, we watched a video from Khan Academy and then talked about how everyone makes mistakes, and that’s part of learning. To show that, we drew and wrote about times when we didn’t know something, but we ended up learning. We also thought about something that we’re in the process of learning. A big thing we learned about was that making mistakes makes our brains grow! When we simply get a write answer, there is not much activity in the brain. When we are thinking deeply, trying new things, and making mistakes, those are the times our brains are really growing.

This morning, we went to an assembly with Mrs. Kropp. She talked to us about the school rules and being safe. It’s important for us to be safe, responsible, and respectful.

We’re looking forward to a great year together! Have a WINNing weekend!