It’s been a busy week in third grade! This week, our focus has been on active listening and developing collaborative skills. Academically, students have been reviewing addition and subtraction strategies, determining how to select ‘just right’ books, and constructing stoplight paragraphs. To be successful in third grade (and life in general), we all must harness a set of collaborative skills. To become masters of collaboration, our class started things off with a discussion centered on teamwork as a life skill. In the classroom, we often work in groups and rely on one another. This requires a knowledge of how to work together and be a team player. Together, we created a rubric that we’ll refer to throughout the year, ranking collaborative efforts on a scale from 1 to 4 stars. To test their collaboration, third graders worked in small groups to stack cup towers. The goal was to not only stack a tower as tall as possible, but to maintain 3 or 4 star collaboration despite feelings of frustration and towers toppling over. The activity sparked some great conversations, and third graders are now well-versed on the importance of effective collaboration! We will keep practicing the important skill throughout the school year! Math this week was centered on reviewing addition and subtraction concepts. Students were tasked with analyzing key terms within word problems that signify what operation needs to be used. Some third graders even began doing this in multi-step, multi-operation word problems! Next week, we will be reviewing subtraction regrouping in 2 and 3 digit problems. In Reader’s Workshop, third graders have been working on selecting ‘just right’ books. Third graders decided that for a book to be considered a good fit it must be at the reader’s level, be interesting enough to hold focus, and the reader should comprehend the story/information. To round out the week, third graders analyzed their reading logs, looking for patterns in their reading and ultimately setting new goals for themselves. Next week, our focus will be on sharing our reading with a partner and comprehension checks. Writing centered on developing a well-organized paragraph according to the stoplight writing system. The system is a great tool to use when learning how to write in paragraph form but can admittedly feel tedious when first learning the process. As a whole group, we wrote a paragraph to answer the prompt pictured. Writing the paragraph together proved to be a great collaborative effort! We will continue practicing with the stoplight method next week, where third graders will write their own paragraphs on a topic of their choice. Business:
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Mrs. Minatta is a third grade teacher at Cottonwood Creek Elementary. See and read all about what third graders are up to throughout the school year! Archives
March 2021
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