Hello Families,
Your kids have been working hard in Temescal Creek. Highlights from last week include: Preparing the garden beds for planting sunflowers and vegetables; Making new signage for the bathrooms with our buddies; Beginning to learn about transpiration with celery and food coloring; And experiments on ocean acidity and greenhouse gases!
There won’t be a homework packet until January. However, we ask that your children read for at least 20 minutes per day! Taking turns reading a chapter book and reading aloud are great ways to support your little one’s growth as readers. Below you will see pictures of the students making “text-to-self” connections with picture books. In one of the pictures, you will see a list of prompts that remind third-graders to stop and think about the book they are reading. Using these prompts to make connections helps students better understand the key facets of the story.
We also began a project called “Grow Your Garden.” This is a project we do at the beginning of each TBS year. We explain it as painting a portrait, but with words instead of paint. In addition to being great vocabulary practice for the kids, it helps the teachers know more about each student’s interests, strengths, and challenges, which help us support them as they progress through third grade.
The goal of “Rocket Write” is to get pencils moving and ideas flowing for short sprints. For our first prompt, students were asked to write about a weekend memory. In the future, we will be asking kids to step out of their comfort zones and write using prompts that will stretch them. In these quick writing periods, details matter more than spelling and grammar. We just circle words that look funny and quickly move on. The pictures below show the kids who were interested in sharing their work with the class!
In math this week, students rotated through four stations: Dreambox, make the sum, addition tables, and independent work. This was our first time switching groups, and the kids handled it like old pros. Dreambox tailors lessons to each student so that we can monitor each student’s progress and customize lessons accordingly. Dreambox will soon be available for home use; details about this will be coming soon in a Friday Folder. Also, each student chose a survey question and polled their classmates. Next week we will graph the data!
The celery experiment was a huge hit. We began the lesson by holding up a stalk of celery and sharing what we saw. This lead to some predictions about what may happen in this experiment. We added food coloring to four of the five jars, and the room went wild! After this, students used their STEAM journals to follow a thinking routine that we call, See, Think, Wonder. They are learning to look closely at details and describe what they see using full sentences. Next week we will observe changes and learn about the process of transpiration.
Super Science and Art fell on the day of the Climate Strike. We paired up with our 7th-grade buddies for several projects. Together, we sorted commonly used materials from campus and figured out the proper bin to dispose of them in. We made new signs for the bathrooms together. Later in the day, we did several projects which included cleaning up the garden beds outside to get them ready for planting and making pots out of newspaper to grow sunflower seeds in. Jackie and Julianne ran two experiments that demonstrated ocean acidification and how greenhouse gases work. One student described it as the best day of third grade yet! Lots of smiles and hands-on experiences.
Throughout the week, we had conversations about the concept of consent. The children were already very knowledgeable and had lots to share. You will see pictures of our Kidpower signs below and may have already seen them around campus. The signs are serving as a touchpoint for discussion about what is allowed and not allowed at school.
Happy Birthday, to our new nine-year-old! It was so fun to see pictures of you as a baby and hear all of the birthday wishes from your friends.
This beginning of this week is supposed to be very hot. Our classroom can get quite warm, even with a fan going and the shades closed. Please keep this in mind as you help your children dress for school.
In community,
Emily and Jackie
