A Busy Week!

Wow!  Our students have sure been busy learning fun new skills this week...and we couldn't be more proud of them!  We just love working with these students and we enjoy watching them find success at the new tasks they are being introduced to.  Enjoy the pictures from our busy week!

Justin is skimming and scanning his article to find details about bats.

Jayden has found some details about baby bats!

Our blue math group has been working on place value concepts and different ways to show numbers.  We made these candy corn treats to demonstrate all the different ways that a number can be shown.  The students did a fabulous job!

Mrs. Head has been working with the reading groups to find main ideas and details in reading selections.  These bats turned out so cute and the students really had to work to apply what they were learning.

Another great example!

The red math group has been working on addition and solving addition sentences.  The students played "Watermelon Addition" to solve addition problems.  They worked with partners to count groups of seeds and find the sums to addition problems.  So fun!

Our class has the bulletin board by the office this month so we decided to use our main idea bats and our showing numbers candy corn to decorate the board.  If you are in the building you should take a look...they worked so hard and the final products were great!

Another thing we have been doing is working in stations during math class.  We do this once or twice a week and it really benefits the students.  They spend time at a different station with each teacher and practice our current skill with three different applications.  This week we were working on addition.  Here, Mrs. Shepherd's station was working with an online game where students had to join groups of marbles to solve addition problems.

This was my station.  It was an application station.  The students had to apply everything we had learned to complete the task.  They had sheets with "calculators."  The calculators had addition problems written on them.  The students used counters and workmats to model addition and find the sums.  I was impressed with how independently they worked.

Mrs. Head's station had an addition game.  Students drew a card and modeled the addition problems on their workmats.  Once they discovered the sum, they got to collect the calculator with the matching number.  They loved this game!

Close up of the game.

When students model addition they use these workmats.  They start by forming two groups with the addends.  This was for 4 + 4.

Next the students join the groups to make one whole group (to visualize the addition process).

Finally, they record their answers on the sheet!

Addition Game Fun

Our third grade students had so much fun playing addition games in class (I am not even sure they realized how much they were learning!). The students had to work with counters to solve addition problems and they even had to learning to check their partners answer using an answer key.  This was not only a good review of addition skills, but excellent practice with turn taking and game playing skills.  They loved it!

Short "i"

Mrs. Head has been working on the short "i" sound in reading.  To practice, the students recently made short "i" booklets complete with a spinning wheel containing all kinds of short "i" words.  Hopefully they read those to you at home!  :)

Making Numbers

As you may remember, we have been working on ways to make numbers.  To check the students understanding of this concept we finished the week with a counting apples activity.  The students had to find different ways to make the numbers 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.  They used two color counters and found lots of ways to show these numbers.  They did a great job!