Race Track Fractions

We have been practicing fractions in math for a few weeks now. Something we are working on still is adding fractions. One game we have played to practice that now is Race Track Fractions. In order to play this game you need to roll a die twice and make a fraction out of the numbers you roll. The smaller number is the numerator (top) and the larger number is the denominator (bottom). There are five race tracks a student needs to complete in order to win the game. The race tracks are split into half, thirds, fourths, fifths, and sixths. The first student to finish all five tracks is the winner!

Finding the Characteristics of Poetry

 

In writing students are learning about poetry. To start, we read and talked about poetry. Our focus was on the characteristics of poetry. We know that poetry often times rhymes, has repeating lines, discusses a single topic, sometimes looks like a list, sometimes looks like a shape, has imagery (the five senses), and has a certain feeling or emotion. We looked through a variety of our new library books to find these characteristics and when we did find something we added it to an anchor chart of that characteristic trait. At the end of our search, we went over our lists and reviewed our findings.

Mission Day After Party- Celebrating the 3 Bs

What seems like a long, long time ago our class filled our Monty Eagle on the front door. In order to fill the Monty eagle you have to earn Monty feathers. Monty feathers are earned for being safe, respectful, and responsible students. We filled our eagle with 377 feathers back in January but we didn't have our celebration because I was missing some of the equipment needed. Once I found what I needed, I didn't want to upset all our important space learning so I waited until Mission Day came and we celebrated afterwards. Our celebration of our respectfulness, safeness, and responsibility was an X-box Kinect party. We played Kinect Adventures and a dance game. It was so fun and who knew my class had so many amazing dancers?! We had our alien cupcakes and snacks from Sam's mom while we danced and played. It was a good way to end our space unit and celebrate being going Montello citizens. I'm very proud of my third graders. 

 Rukia, Gidhan, and Binti are cheesing it up for the camera with 
their minty alien cupcakes.

Abdi showing off his sweet alien cupcake!

Brady and Xavier are doing their best to beat this 
Kinect Adventures game! 

 When it wasn't their turn, students waited patiently and 
watched their classmates on the projection screen.

 Ryan is very concentrated playing 10,000 Leaks. He has to 
wave his arms and legs around to cover all the holes from the
fish and sharks swimming by his glass tank.

Now John and Kayla are trying their best to cover up all those 
leaks. You need to be very flexible to get this job done.

Mission Day, Part 3: Our Writing

 As you all know, there were two teams in this planet research extravaganza... the inner and the outer planets. Each team wrote a persuasive letter to a group of aliens looking to settle somwhere in the solar system. All of our Mission Day visitors voted on the letter they agreed with best during Mission Day and after counting the votes we found that Team Outer had won... Yeah Team Outer!!!

Team Inner's letter was very, very, VERY long and included arguments like the joys of acid rain, never ending amounts of cooked pizza without the oven to cook it, and Earth, a livable planet. Team Outer's letter advertised quite well if I do say so myself, as their team leader, with some sweet planet/student photographs. We argued that you would have more space to play, could enjoy never ending amounts of popsicles that don't melt, and hot, burning cores where you can still cook your dinner. Both letters were brilliant and very convincing if I do say so myself. The third graders should be very proud!

 Dalton and Trinaty

Brady and Xavier

 Binti and Sam

 Erin and Fardowsa

 Faisal and Tristan

 Amiira

 Rukia and Ryan

Sabrian and Yasmin

Abdi and Kayla

Gidhan and John

Mission Day Part 2: The Planets

 We turned our classroom into our own personal solar system. Here is a linear view of the outer planets. Uranus is closest to the camera, then Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter. We realized that Neptune and Uranus were reversed but since I had already dropped Neptune once from it's fishing line hammock, we left it there.

 Here are our inner planets from a distance, Mars is closest to the camera and then of course, Earth, Venus, Mercury and the sun. 

 

 Here is our outer planets again from a far. You can see Pluto, Jupiter's big red spot, and Neptune's blue wind storm from this angle!

 

 Here's an up close of Venus. Didn't Sam and Binti do a great job painting it? It really looks fiery and boiling hot!

Saturn has some pretty amazing wire rings! It was painted so well too. You would never know that their planet's balloon exploded twice and they had to roll paper towels for what seemed like an eternity to get this beautiful planet to look like this! 

 

 Jupiter... the biggest planet in the solar system! And it's huge red storm spot!

 

 Neptune and Uranus may be in the wrong order but they are two beautiful blue and gaseous planets aren't they?

Mission Day: Part 1

 

Mission Day was awesome! We turned off all the lights in our classroom and taught our guests all about the planets that we studied.  Everyone was so impressed and they couldn't wait to hear more! Ryan's mom was nice enough to pose with our space man suit before she left.

 

 Brady was so excited that his mom, dad, and Mrs. Smith came! He couldn't wait to teach them all about his planet Mars. 

   

Dalton and Trinaty are reciting their sun facts to inner planet team leader, Mrs. Turgeon and the ELL teacher, Mr. Maroon.  

 

 We invited our pod mates to our classroom to learn from us. Fardowsa is teaching sixth graders and her fellow inner team mate about Earth. 

 We used flashlights to show our guests the amazing papier mache planets above us. Sabrina and Yasmin are teaching sixth and fifth grade pod mates about Uranus, the tilted planet.

Abdi is teaching Mr. Brannigan, the special education technician and his classmate Rukia all about Neptune, the last planet in the solar system, don't you know?

Using the Dictionaries During Reading Groups

Reading all these Roald Dahl books, my third graders are being introduced to all sorts of interesting words!! During our meetings on James and the Giant Peach, my readers have been practicing finding the definitions in our classroom dictionaries. We have looked for words like:

• intently
• famished
• colossal
• cresting
• billowing
• consternation
• ominous
• vales 
• cautiously

... and lots of other interesting words. Do you know any of the definitions without looking in the dictionary? Do you know how to use the dictionary to find the definitions? If not, my third graders could teach you. 

Mission Day Goodies

For Mission Day I made alien cupcakes as a surprise for the students and I also made bags of eyeball slime for the winners in the Inner Planet versus Outer Planet persuasive letter contest. Both came out pretty cool!

Hanging the Solar System

After a lot of thinking and planning, and going back and forth on whether it was safe or not... we decided to hang out papier mache planets. It was a lot of work and a little scary, but we did it! We jabbed wholes in most of them and then stuck rulers inside, kind of like ship anchors to keep them from ripping huge holes. We wrapped yarn around the ruler multiple times and then tied the planets to the two poles on our ceiling. 

We didn't do that with Saturn and Neptune though because their balloons kept popping and instead of being hollow they were rolled up paper towels. They were too heavy to hang so we made them little hammocks out of fishing wire. I dropped Neptune once.... about 10 feet; but it was safe. Don't worry! 

We also didn't hang the planets in order from the sun all the way to Pluto. We put inner planets on one pole (plus the sun) and outer planets (plus Pluto) on the other side. It was an inner versus outer set up and we thought that would work better for our presentation.