Hands Off! Rocket Man, A Walk in the PARCC, the Balloon Countdown, an Egg Hunt, and a Frozen-themed Fraction song

Our learning sure has been "hands on" lately.

It's hard to decide where to start!

We conducted an experiment to witness the effects of dirty vs clean hands. And boy, did we see changes--moldy changes!

Last Friday we were fortunate enough to meet Mr. Heission, also known as Rocket Man, and learn a great deal about the space race, rockets, and equipment astronauts use in space.

Our frozen fact families were perfect fits amid a snowy, snowy winter.

Greek and Latin roots such as aqua, mort, struct, mal, phone comprised our forest of root trees. These roots become particularly valuable when determining the meaning of unfamiliar words. For example, knowing that mal means poor or bad, helps us determine the meaning of malnutrition.

Our balloon countdown to PARCC led us on a synonym egg hunt around Room 16...

 

 

We have reviewed some test-taking strategies for reading passages and solving word problems. When beginning a new passage it is important to activate our schema and recall background knowledge on the topic. Previewing the questions first gives us a purpose for our reading. Reading questions and bolded words carefully allows us to focus on what is being asked and highlights multiple parts to a question. Finally, slashing the trash eliminates wrong answers and helps narrow our options when responding to multiple choice questions.

Mrs. Killinger was kind enough to let us borrow Dr. Seuss's Hooray for Diffendoofer Day-- a motivational read the day before our first day of PARCC testing.

In math we have kicked off our exploration of fractions. We learned the difference between the numerator and denominator. This fraction video has a Frozen twist I'm sure you'll enjoy!

A Field Trip, the Spring Concert, and a Published Poetry Picnic

We sure closed out the year on a high note!

In math, we used real world data to convert measurements in feet to inches. Specifically, we used the heights of teachers at Memorial Park and a few Hollywood celebrities.

Late in May, we were fortunate enough to travel back in time to Plimoth Plantation to visit the Wampanoag homesite and Pilgrim village. Here is a mere snippet of our very busy day. To see the full album click here. 

 

As we prepared for our Publishing Poetry Picnic and Color Party, we chose our favorite published poem to record using an app called 30Hands. Our audio clips and photographs combined to create our Passion for Poetry video that opened our Publishing Poetry Picnic. 

To watch the Passion for Poetry video in its entirety, visit this link to our Youtube video. 

Our school's annual Memorial Day program was a touching tribute coordinated by the talented Mrs. Bissonnette.

Our fascination with all things Cinderella continued with the reading of  several versions of the traditional story.

The spring concert was beautiful! We sure have a group of talented singers among us!

Writers shared many of the exciting highlights and topics covered in third grade in a writing piece that will be displayed in the fall welcoming Mrs. Mack's newest batch of third graders.
 

We closed out May with the kickoff to our Countdown to Summer balloon surprise. Our first balloon surprise was a classroom picture-in-a-picture photo shoot! #saycheese!

 

To practice the placement of commas and the use of capitalization in names and addresses, we mailed notes home to parents and siblings. 

We closed out May with a class store. Our hard-earned BBQ Bucks were spent on funky sunglasses, bubbles, Rubik cubes, fun summery cups, and insect catchers. 

Our second balloon surprise was sidewalk chalk. It was a gorgeous morning to get creative with sidewalk chalk on the playground. 

And what a gorgeous afternoon we got for our Published Poetry Picnic and Color Party! Poets were eager to share their published poetry anthology with moms, dads, aunts, uncles, siblings, and first grade buddy readers! Not to mention the colorful and healthy spread!

And with that, May was a wrap!