Family and School Traditions
We had a blast this week getting to talk about and experience old and new traditions! This week we wrapped up our Family unit in Social Studies. In doing so, we were able to discuss and write about our favorite family traditions.
Carving pumpkins is always a super FUN tradition to have with your family!
I always love hearing about the different, fun birthday traditions families have!
On Wednesday, we were able to participate in a fairly new Forest View Tradition, the Halloween Hike and Wax Museum. The third graders have been hosting a wax museum for many years, however last year we started a new tradition which involves a super fun Halloween Hike on our very own nature trail through the forest surrounding school. Our PTO does a great job of decorating our trail and providing us with a fun little scavenger hunt along the way!
We always like to stop mid way and dance/practice our scary Halloween moves!
On Wednesday, we also changed up our normal routine and introduced STEM stations rather than our normal Daily 5 literacy stations. STEM involves Science exploration, Technology, Engineering and Math. During our work, our class was split into pairs and had to work together to formulate plans, test their designs, attempt challenges and then rework their designs if they did not work as well as they had planned the first time. We had a BLAST making pumpkin catapults, spiderweb bridges, and candy towers.
During our catapult building, students discovered that their catapults needed a base, an "arm" or launcher to throw the pumpkin, as well as a method for lifting the arm. Before the challenge, we saw examples of real pumpkin catapults and the desired result. While working, I really enjoyed listening to the discussions that they were having about how to successfully build a catapult and their reasoning for changes they needed to make.
Pandora had some great reasoning and was using her engineering mind to improve her and Zoey's design!
While at the Candy Tower station, students had to use candy pumpkins (hard/heavy and gummy) as well as candy corn and toothpicks to attempt to make a free standing tower, as tall as they could. There were a lot of discussions about making separate parts and attaching them to their partner's section, discussions about how to support their towers adequately so that they could stand as well as redesign them to get them to stand even taller!
Each of the stations proved to have its own set of challenges, which our friends were not expecting when initially being introduced to the activity. For the spider web station, students had to build a strong enough bridge made from string attached to cups using tape to hold as many "spiders" as possible. The biggest "trick" for this challenge was for students to make their base sturdy (some figured our that if they taped the cups to the table it would not move and they could attach their string easier. They also had to figure our the best way to attach multiple strings in order to make a deck strong enough to hold their blocks.
After each station, students discussed how it went with their partners and then wrote in their journals about what went well, what was challenging and how they improved their design throughout the process. We had some great reflective thinkers!!!
In math this week, we worked on fact families and relating addition and subtraction. it can be a tricky concept to use addition to help solve a subtraction equation using those same three numbers (and realize we don't need to draw circle drawings to help us solve them).
We have been practicing fact families for morning work using our candy corn fact families, which studnets are enjoying and getting better at each time they practice. Try it at home!
Use the three numbers on each of these candy corn pieces and see how your child can write two addition and two subtraction equations using only those three numbers!
I hope that you all enjoy your extended weekend and have the opportunity to do some fun things with your family as well as get rested and recharged to start another full week of learning! Don't forget that Sunday is daylight savings so you will need to turn your clocks back 1 hour! Make sure to check back on the homepage for important dates as well!
Our next Scholastic Book Order is due on November 19th. Flyers went home today. There are tons of options and if you are trying to think ahead and get prepared for the upcoming holidays, books make GREAT gifts!
