Cause and Effect

Today we wrapped up our cause and effect unit that we have been working on. The kids have been reading a variety of picture books to identify examples of cause and effect in our readings. Our assignment today was to write a comic strip, much like the books If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, but our title was “If you give a3rd grader a…”. We completed, or are in the process of completing this assignment using Comic Creator.

Cause and Effect

Today we introduced cause and effect relationships. While it’s a concept we talk about all the time, when you actually have to identify each in a story, it can become a rather difficult task.

We used the book The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash by Trinka Hakes Noble to help us identify these relationships. After brainstorming some ideas as to how we can identify them, we came up with the fact that doing it backwards might work best for most of us. Picking out the effect and then figuring out the cause is a strategy that could help us out with this task.

Stanford Testing

So this week is our Stanford testing! The schedule for the week is below.

Monday (AM and PM testing) – word study, vocabulary, and listening

Tuesday (AM and PM testing) – reading comprehension and spelling

Wednesday – language

Thursday – Math problem solving

Friday – Math procedures

Watershed

Today we began our watershed unit. We discussed what a watershed was and used this Prezi to introduce the topic. A fire drill cut us a little short, but we will finish it up tomorrow.

Creating Bar Graphs

Today we introduced bar graphs. I had the students write down their first name on an index card and we recorded the number of vowels in our first names. After we collected this data we recorded it and created a bar graph…well sort of.

Tomorrow we are going to collect some more data and use the Data Grapher to create our bar graphs!

Day One…DONE

So today was quite an interesting start to the school year. As the kids were on their way to school…TJ’s power went out. We made our way through that bit of trouble and had quite a successful day. We read and interviewed classmates, as well as talked about what a scientist does. Check out our Wordle below of things we came up with.

Seeing Division

Today we focused our division lesson on seeing what it means to really divide. We used some base 10 block and word problems to solve, and see, our quotients. The kids really enjoyed this and worked well together! They did an awesome job!

Force and Motion

Today was our 1st “real” force and motion experiment. We investigated the effects of falling weights (metal washers) on the movement of our cars. The class did an awesome job observing and collecting data for this experiment. The kids were able to identify many parts of the experiment that showed potential or kinetic energy, inertia, and friction.

Justice vs. Injustice

Yesterday we began our new Literature unit, Justice/Injustice. The students began by brainstorming words they thought of when they heard each word and had a chance to create a graphic organizer based on their discussion of the words.

After we completed that task the students were given images from the Library of Congress to sort into categories of Justice and Injustice. We had several spirited conversations as to what pictures belonged where and why. The class did an awesome job!

Fiction vs. Non-fiction

Recently we began our non-fiction unit. The kids sat down with their homework buddies and discussed what they thought they knew about fiction and non-fiction. We put together this list of what we felt was really important. The kids will be adding to this list as we work through the unit.