Roxie's Unsolved Riddle

In one of her recent letters, Roxie sent us the following riddle and we haven't solved it yet. Maybe you can help.

What is light as a feather, but even the strongest person cannot hold it more than a few minutes?

p.s.

Check out the school website for a newsletter about upcoming Family Literacy Day.

Story Elements

Today we read the Piggy Book with Mrs. Pink. We used a triangle, a rectangle and a circle to help us learn about the elements in a story. Ask your child to explain how character, setting and problem fit into the triangle.

Subtraction Strategies

Today we explored subtracting through addition. Ask your child to solve a problem like 73-28 for you using a strategy that we talked about at school. Here are some pictures of the strategies and one of our students at work.

Music to Our Ears

We continued working on learning about different music terms and notes today.

Addition Practice

Here is a site that your child can use to practice adding two and three digit numbers. They might need a pencil and paper handy to write down their strategies as they work. Encourage them to try to solve each question two different ways.
http://www.ixl.com/math/practice/grade-3-add-two-numbers-up-to-three-digits

Reading Buddies!

By Faith and Dusana

We the grade 3's have reading buddies with the JK's. They are very nice. Half of the kids in JK come to our class. And half of the JK kids to their class. We help the JK kids learn and we read to them too. Sometimes we play with them and we do art sometimes with them. We enjoy them so much.

Invented Math Strategies!

Today, we looked at the question 46 + 38 and created our own ways to solve this question. We came up with eight different ways to solve it!

Ask your child to show you how to "add tens, add ones and then combine" or to "make a friendly number and remember the payback."

January 18th, 2011

What's a SCHEMA?
Today we problem-solved to figure out what a mystery object was used for. We each used our schema to help us understand what the object was. Can your third-grader explain to you what a schema is or how we use our schema to help us make an inference?

We emptied our Weekly Challenge books and brought home a new challenge for this week (due to the bin by Friday).

REGROUPING
We used regrouping to help us add two-digit numbers in a math problem today. This reminded many us of making a fair trade of 10 pennies for 1 dime when we are dealing with money. We also had a chance to use regrouping in the 'magic' trick that one of our students shared with us today!

Mad Science forms are due to the school by tomorrow if you want to take part in the program.

Reflecting About Pizza

We had a great discussion about the strategies our class used to solve the pizza problem. This is a summary of our discussion. We also played a great game of Money Jeopardy!

Tara's Pizza Problem - Jan. 11, 2011

We had some good discussions today sharing the different strategies that we used to solve this problem. Here is some of our work.
Even though they look different, can you find some connections between the different samples of work?

Is there a different way to explain the same answer? 

A Music Concert for Science

Today we learned that if you have to make a structure, it needs to be stable. JB

It can't be leaning because it will fall down if there is too much weight on one side. GT

You need to put more footers underneath the structure if you want to put more weight on top. FT

For a structure to be stable, you need the base, the plates and the materials to make your structure. KD

Today's Notes

Money Activity

Check out this link for some fun ideas for problem-solving with money amounts at home!

http://athomewithmath.terc.edu/english_PDF/math_ENG_sect7.pdf

Eastdale Website

Check out the new Eastdale website.

Jump Into January!

Welcome to the grade three blog page!
Here's what we are up to this week:
Math - We are learning about money and adding money amounts up to $10.
Language - We are continuing to read "Life According to Humphrey" and developing our editing skills using periods, capitals and commas.
Music - Beat and rhythm are what we are looking for in songs we hear and sing.
Drama - Amber was in to teach us some fun drama games like Zip, Zap, Zop!
Science - We have built our first structures and tested their stability with Mr. O'Connor.
Character - The character trait for the month of January is RESPECT. We will be organizing the assembly for this month. Students wrote some announcements about showing respect (to other people, the environment, ours and other's belongings).

The food drive was a huge success and we were the Primary Division winners (and finished 2nd in the school overall)!! Great effort!