The Third Grade Learning Spot: 2017-2018 First Week Fun

Our 2017-2018 school year was off to an awesome start in The Third Grade Learning Spot! Our first group meeting was to read a welcome message on the classroom easel, followed by the read-aloud First Day Jitters.

After sharing what having the jitters means we read the poem Jitter Juice and wrote a reading response about how we felt the first day of school...while drinking our own jitter juice! Students tried to guess what the secret recipe to make jitter juice. I can't share the ingredients because it's a teacher top secret. 😉

Another back to school read-aloud we had was The Gingerbread Man is Loose in School. I'm not sure who enjoyed it the most-the students hearing about the Gingerbread Man's school antics or me listening to the students' laughter.

A fun get to know you activity students engaged in was "Two Truths and a Fib". Students wrote 2 truths about themselves, then 1 fib. After they read their statements we tried to guess which one was the fib. Fib statements included "I have 10 brothers", "I have 6 pets", and "I pet a lion."

Our first activity in math was to review place value. The class watched a Smartboard video to review ones-thousands. Other place value activities included rolling dice to create 4 digit numbers and then identifying each number's place value; writing numbers in standard, word, and expanded form, and creating a giant place value chart on the gym floor and then using ourselves as the counters to represent 3 digit-6 digit numbers!

Our first writing activity was beginning our journals. Journal writing will build our skills in free writing, responding to specific questions using details for support, and writing mechanics such as grammar. Each day our journal helper uses Popsicle sticks with students' names on them to choose 3 readers to share their responses.

We also began our poetry unit by writing autobiography poems, which we mounted on paper plate self-portraits. They are displayed on our hallway bulletin board.

Every year the highlight of the first week is our "Save Fred" experiment and this year was no exception! First, we reviewed the steps of the scientific method...

Next, we read about Fred the gummy worm who goes sailing, but then his boat (cup) capsizes and his life preserver (gummy ring) gets trapped underneath. Teams were challenged to save Fred by getting him into his life preserver...the catch being they can only use 4 paperclips as tools and not use their hands. Each team made a hypothesis how Fred should be saved, then tested it to see if it worked. Once all teams had found the solution they recorded the steps on a flow chart...