Mrs. Cranley's 3rd Grade : May 23-27

Hello Everyone!

The end of the year is approaching rapidly, but we still have learning and projects underway. We won’t be stopping until the school bell rings at 2:15 on June 9! Here's a recap of our last week in the classroom.

PORTLAND BRIDGE MODEL
DUE WEDNESDAY!

Please arrange for the safe transportation of your child’s bridge model to school Wednesday morning. Tables will be set up outside our classroom and you are invited to bring them up as soon as you arrive to school. The building is open early so bring them in whenever is convenient for you.

The first bridge presentations will begin Wednesday afternoon. The presentation part is pretty casual. I’ve asked the students to be able to discuss the materials and process they went through to build the bridge. We’ve already researched each Portland Bridge in detail, so they are not expected to present a report on the details of the “real” bridge, just be able to communicate the details of their bridge, materials, and construction. I hope you had fun bonding with your child over the construction of an iconic Portland Bridge.

LITERACY

This week we read Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg.

This was a very cute story written from the perspective of ants.

The story begins when a colony of ants discovers a sugar bowl in a kitchen. A string of ants set out to collect their prized crystal to bring back to the queen of their colony. After arriving at the sugar bowl destination, two ants get the bright idea of staying in the sugar bowl, basking in the glory of the sugar discovery. They question whether or not they should even return to their home. Left behind by the rest of the ants, they find themselves being scooped up and dropped into a hot brown lake and swirled around in a steamy dark whirlpool. They manage to survive and scale the steep wall to their exit. They take refuge in the cracks and crevices of a round disc (English muffin), which is then lowered into narrow passages. Here they experience extreme heat and lethal cooking conditions before being ejected into the air. Hot and sweaty, they see a cool waterfall that looks to be the key to their refreshment, so they lean in to cool their heads and get swept down into a dark whole. Before they know it, they are twirling around in a tornado-like mix of water and food. With yet another narrow escape from death, they climb their way to freedom and attempt to take refuge in 2 dark symmetrical holes in the wall (outlet), at which time their wet bodies get ejected backwards from the wall. Battered and beaten, the ants see their troop returning to retrieve yet another sugar crystal. They quickly fall back into line, deciding that it wasn’t such a bad idea to do as the rest, and bring their crystal back to the colony for safe keeping.

The students demonstrated their reading comprehension through discussion of the story. We skipped the traditional story test and opted for a more creative interaction with this story.

First we played word detective and set on a mission to examine the word choice in the selection.

Students had to locate 5 examples of interesting verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and position words. Once they successfully completed this activity in their literacy notebooks, each student was asked to create a picture from an ant’s perspective. Their drawing would eventually incorporate a large ant, so they were encouraged to keep in mind the scale of the objects in their drawing, or they'd end up with an ant the size of your hand or foot. This was easier said then done, and many students had to keep zooming in on their objects in order for the size of the ant to make sense.

WRITING

We are in the process of typing up our stories, and putting together our book of published writing.

Some students are even working on a final writing piece of the year— a fictional narrative.

MATH

We have been working on our skills with double-digit and triple-digit multiplication.

Before teaching the students the traditional algorithm for multiplying multi-digit numbers, we begin with building a conceptual background of the quantities we are working with.

This week students will practice multiplying larger numbers using the algorithm.

SOCIAL STUDIES

We spent most of our week learning all about each Portland Bridge, as pairs students presented of their written summaries and illustrations.

Our goal was to become familiar with the basic information about each bridge, as well as learn what makes each one unique.

While charting the basic information for each bridge, I pose a variety of questions that encourage students to examine the information and come to some kind of conclusion on their own.

For example, after learning that both the Morrison Bridge and the Steel Bridge were originally swing span bridges but are now bascule and vertical lift bridges, I asked the students...

What conclusion can we draw about swing span bridges?

The opportunities for higher level thinking and questioning were abundant and authentic. The students are getting so much out of this unit!

As you can imagine, with lengthy discussions being the norm, it took most of the week to get through each presentation and chart all of this information.

While I filled in the information on the classroom chart, each student was responsible for recording the information on their personal chart.

As each bridge is discussed, we hang the posters in chronological order, labeling each with the year or years they were constructed, to reinforce our knowledge of the timeline.