The Third Grade Learning Spot

Our 2nd week of class was full of lots of hands-on learning activities. We began our Harcourt reading anthology exploring character traits. After reading Officer Buckle and Gloria, students wrote Post-its about Officer Buckle's outer and inner traits for our interactive chart. Afterwards, we made text-to-self connections by completing an "Officer Buckle and Me" character trait graphic organizer. In Allie's Dreams, we explored what traits help us reach our goals and matched basketballs to nets on a "What Character is Like/Character's Words and Actions" poster.

 

Our poetry writing unit began with us learning about  types of poems such as concrete poetry, acrostic poetry, limericks, haikus, list poems, diamantes, and couplets. We created our own "Fall is..." list poems by first brainstorming things about fall for a fall bubble map and then converting our ideas into phrases using an adjective-adjective-noun-verb format. After writing final drafts, students painted leaf patterns with Do-a-Dot paint bottles that their poems were glued onto. Look for our "Poet-tree" growing soon on our hallway bulletin board!

 

In math, we explored place value visually and kinesthetically. We formed numbers in the 1000's, 100's, and 10's place using number cards. Students used pretzel rods and place value place mats to show how many 1's, 10's, 100's, and 1,000's were in numbers and then enjoyed munching on their math manipulatives!

 

The class also played "Swat It" using a place value poster, hand pointer, and number cards to form specific numbers and identify the place value.

 

In science, we began our human body unit. A volunteer wore a body apron and students identified organs, their role, and placed them where they are located on the apron. We learned the 6 body systems, what our bones and muscles do, and identified bones on real x-rays. The students also created their own bodies for our "We're Organ Wise!" clothesline using face photos, brown paper lunch bags, and organ patterns.

We started our Harcourt language arts anthology learning about sentences, punctuation, and subjects and predicates. Students identified sentence strip phrases as subjects or predicates, placed them on the correct side of a "Subject or Predicate" chart, and then used an Expo marker to write the missing part of the sentence. They also practiced punctuation using sentence strips and food: Cheerios represented periods, elbow pasta and Cheerios were question marks, and straight noodles and Cheerios were exclamation points.