Snow Day Challenge #2

Well, what do you know. Another Snow Day? Well, that means Another Snow Day Challenge!

For our last Challenge we had some AMAZING blog posts. What will happen this time?

Your Snow Day Challenge #2 is:

BE KIND!

What can you do to be kind? Can you give a compliment, help someone with a chore or a project, share something you have?

Who can you be kind to? Your brother or sister, your Mom, Dad, Grandma, or Grandpa, a friend, a neighbor?

There are so many ways to spread kindness! Think of what you can do to be kind, and then share a blog post about it. Upload a picture if you want to. At the end of the day, I will update our class blog with ways we were kind today.

Have a wonderful SNOW DAY, have a wonderful time being KIND today and I will see everyone tomorrow!

Math Around the Room

We have been working hard on learning area and perimeter of rectangles over the past few weeks. 

What is Area?

What is Perimeter?

As a way to review, we spent some time finding rectangles in the classroom and figuring out the area and perimeter. We used the Skitch app to take pictures of rectangles in the room.

We then had to measure the rectangle we chose and compute the area and perimeter.

It was a great way to review the concepts that we've learned and also practice our measurement skills.

We used the app Skitch to show our work.

Take a look at some of our pictures.

Here is Meredith and Sydney's Skitch picture.

Here is Julian and Avery's Skitch picture.

Here is Riley and Shiloh's Skitch picture.

Here is Mason T. and Dorothy's Skitch Picture.

Here is Lainie and Lauren's Skitch picture.

We also used Skitch to start thinking about fractions in our new fraction unit.

We took pictures of items in the classroom and divided them into equal portions.

We can find math wherever we look. Can you think of some times when we use area, perimeter, or fractions in our daily life?

Snow Day Challenge #1

Hello Amazing Third Graders!

As promised, here is your first Snow Day Challenge.

Your first challenge is...

CREATE!

Yes, Create! You can create out of paper, blocks, toys, snow, toothpicks, and well, pretty much anything! Use your imagination and make a creation.

Then, tell us about your creation on your blog. Write an amazing paragraph (or more) explaining your creation. If you can, upload a picture of what you made.

I will check back at the end of the day and update our class blog with the creations.

UPDATE
Check out these awesome Snow Day Challenge blog posts!

Sydney wrote a great paragraph all about the zoo she created. Check out her paragraph at her blog, Sydney's Stupendous Blog.

Dorothy wrote a wonderful blog post about her Lego Creation. Looks really cool!

Read about what she created on her blog here: Dorothy's Distinctive Blog.

Lainie made a monster during our Snow Day! Read her great post. Lainie's Magnificent Blog.

Have an amazing Snow Day and I look forward to seeing your wonderful creations!

Kidwish 2016

We started off our school year with a collaborative project called Kidwish 2016.

For Kidwish, we started with thinking of a wish we had for the world for  the year 2016. We were going to connect with students in Ms. Chapman's third grade class in Andover, Kansas and share our wishes with them.

After we decided what our wishes for the world were, we made cards for our friends in Kansas. We each wrote to a student in Ms. Chapman's class and that same student wrote back to us!

Then we worked on writing essays about our wishes to share with our friends in Kansas. Check them out below.

Joey's wish:



Lainie's wish:


Meredith's wish:


Mason T's wish:


Julian's wish:


Shiloh's wish:


Dorothy's wish:


Addison's wish:


Andrew's wish:


Sydney's wish:


Mason W.'s wish:


Selena's wish:


Camden's wish:


Cordelia's wish:


Ethan's wish:


Korin's wish:


Lauren's wish:


Riley's wish:


Jordan's wish;


Kaityn's wish:


Omar's wish:


Avery's wish:


Then it was time to mail the letters and wait to receive our letters from Kansas. After we received them, we were able to Skype with Ms. Chapman's class and meet the person we wrote the letter to. It was great to see them!

We had a wonderful time connecting with Ms. Chapman's class. We are hoping to also connect with them on their classroom blog and our blogs.

Were you able to read any of our essays? We would love to hear your thoughts about an essay you read in the comment section below.

Multiple Step Story Problems

We have been working on solving multiple step story problems.

A multiple step story problem is a problem where you need to use two or more operations to solve the problem.

Here is an example of a multiple step problem:

To help us understand multiple step problems, we tried a challenge activity. For this activity we started with a target number, and then we had to write a multiple step problem that had our target number as the answer.

There were two guidelines:

1. There had to be at least two steps to get to the answer.
2. The steps had to be different operations.

We used the Explain Everything app to share our problems. 

Below are a few of the multiple step story problems we wrote. This was quite a challenge to do! See if you can solve some of them.

Here is Izzy and Jason's problem.



This is a Jillian and Ian's problem.




Here is Mason W. and Joey's problem.



Here is Jackson and Andrew's problem.




This is Luke and Cordelia's problem.


Thanks for checking out our story problems. Can you choose one and solve it in the comment section below? We would love to hear what you think the answer is.

Holiday Card Exchange

For the second year in a row, our class has participated in a holiday card exchange with classes from around the United States and Canada.

This project is one of the many collaborative projects coordinated by Jen Wagner, an amazing teacher who is willing to share her great ideas.

Our first task was to create some cards for all of the classes on our list. Our theme was SNOW!

When we finished we had lots of cards to send out.

Then it was time to wait for cards to come in. The week before our Holiday Break we had enough for everyone to open a card.

First we used Google Earth to see where the schools from our friends were located.

Then we got to open them! 

We put the information in a spreadsheet to compare and contrast the different schools. Click on the link below to see our data.

Christmas Card Spreadsheet

Look at these beautiful cards!

We had great fun collaborating with other schools with this project. We would love to hear your thoughts or questions about what we did. Please share them with us in the comments section below.

Hour of Code

Last week our classroom participated in the Hour of Code.

What is the Hour of Code? 

The Hour of Code is an introduction to computer science. It introduces the type of logical thinking necessary to write computer code.

Check out the website here: Hour of Code.

Students were able to write code for a variety of different characters.

Some chose to write code for Elsa and Anna from Frozen.

Some chose to write code for Angry Birds.

Minecraft was a very popular choice.

And of course, with the Star Wars movie coming out this week, there had to be a puzzle for Star Wars!

We had to move the blocks to tell the computer how to make the characters move.

It took some time, and the puzzles didn't always work out the first time. We had to try more than once to solve them, and ask each other for help.

However, we stuck with it, and we were able to solve the puzzles!

When we finished, we received a certificate for working on our puzzles!

If your child enjoyed coding and would like to continue on his or her own, check out this link on our classroom website with additional coding opportunities.

Coding Websites


Let us know what you think of what we learned about coding. Please share in the comment section below.