Good Things Happen in Threes

Good Things Happen in Threes

Good Thing Number 1 
Have you ever had the pleasure of starting off the week with the task of finding a great story for a storytelling festival? Well, that is exactly what third graders did this week.

The first part of having a successful storytelling experience is to find a story you love. Mrs. McKenzie gave us dozens of fabulous books to begin our search for a story we love. Some are funny, simple, repetitious; some have moral lesson, some feature animals, and there are many from different countries around the world. They are all great short stories with diverse messages and tones.

After reading at least five books, students have chosen their stories and are ready to begin the work of familiarizing themselves with their stories’ plot. We are NOT memorizing the stories. Storytelling is more flexible, more creative, and tests of one’s ability to problem solve more than memorizing a story. We will learn the basic plot and its twists, and then we will explore the story in depth. What parts speak to us? What part is the audience responding to or not? What part do we need to embellish or make shorter? These are some aspects of storytelling we will delve into next week. 

You can help you child by encouraging him or her to share his or her story with you or a friend. Eye contact, enunciation, verbal expression are great areas about which to give feedback to your first time storyteller. You can tell him or her something you are proud of and offer a suggestion of one area to work on. You could even tell your own story. You could share in the experience of captivating an audience or relate to the nervous feeling of speaking in front of a group. I hope you and your child can make these storytelling times something to remember and to be proud of.

We are having a great time –storytelling is fun, freeing, creative, and has wonderful benefits for comprehension and writing!

Good Thing Number 2

 Do you know the difference between weight and the mass of an object? Your third grader will tell you that it has to do with gravity. If you were to weigh something on the moon it would weigh less than on earth, but the mass of the object would be the same on the moon as on the earth.

In math class this week we ventured into a math lab called Measuring Mass. We massed objects using pan balances and masses. We learned about measurement error, the error involved with the imperfect pan balance, and our own not perfect measuring techniques. We had a lot of success, even with these two imperfections, using the new unit of measurement, gram, and finding the mass of many objects.

Midway through the investigation, we collected data of the mass of different quantities of the same object, constructed a point graph, and drew a “best fit line." The best-fit line is needed due to the measurement error mentioned above.  Using the best-fit line, we discovered a number sentence that could help us compute in a new way the same data: the quantity of objects multiplied by the mass of one 

of the objects equals the total mass of 

those objects. Interesting! So, now we have three ways to find new data from our graph. We can actually mass a certain quantity of objects using the pan balance, we could compute using the number sentence, or we could interpolate or extrapolate the information directly from the line graph. That is what I call an exciting learning day in mathematics class.

Good Thing Number 3

Soup Wednesdays - A way to take the chill off a cold winter's day or a way to build community?  

Both, it seems!  Thank you to the families who have delivered the many delicious soups to our classrooms! This Wednesday's soup was a hearty matzah ball soup. Everyone tried it and many liked it. I am proud of how we learned to appreciate each other’s food preferences.   

You'll also see in the photos some students having lunch with Senora Ayers. She invited children from our class to join her to eat lunch and play a Spanish number treasure hunt. 

Thank you to all who have already sent in delicious soups. You are helping to create community in the classroom and take the chill off a cool winter's day. If you haven’t had a chance to share you soup-making talents with your child’s class, I hope you’ll consider signing up for the last few Soup Wednesdays. 

 Good things do happen in threes!