Let's become bloggers! Fall 2012-2013

Our school year is underway and we have settled into our routines and class work. We are almost ready to wrap up our first trimester!  Time flies when you are having fun!

I have two main goals for this blog:
1. To communicate the learning and activities going on in our room.
2. To give students increased responsibility to update and share class news here.
Another benefit is communication with other third grade classrooms throughout the country.  We will be looking at other classroom blogs for ideas and to model our own posts.

Students,  We are going to explore other blogs from students in our district and from districts far away from Spencerport. 

During our class computer lab time, we will spend time doing this and will begin to share our own posts.  I am really excited to have a class blog and to have you all help keep it current!

Let's become bloggers!

ELL Lab Weather Reports

Seven students in our room go to the ELL lab every day.  They had to opportunity to plan out and present thier own weather reports.  We'd like to share them here:

Title: The Edmund Fitzgerald

  We learned about the Edmund Fitzgerald (Big Fitz for short) in ELA. The story of the Big Fitz is a lot like the story of the Titanic. Both of these ships were huge and both of these ships sunk.

    The Big Fitz was actually named after a man named Edmund Fitzgerald. This ship was a cargo ship and it carried iron ore pellets from the United States to Canada on Lake Superior. It also carried 29 crew men that worked on and painted the ship.

    On November 9, 1975 the Fitz made its last voyage. A storm hit and the Big Fitz was communicating with another ship caught in the storm. Suddenly, the Big Fitz vanished from their radar screen. No one knows exactly how the Big Fitz sunk. We may never know how this ship sunk. It still lies at the bottom of Lake Superior.

    How do you think the Big Fitz sunk?

Gifts!

I wanted to take a minute to show off and express my gratitude for the gifts that students gave to our classroom this year!  I personally received some lovely gifts, which I really appreciate.   This year, I also asked for some "wish list" items for the room. 

As you can see, we received a variety of games for inside recess, some legos, and some markers and glue.  The kids loved opening the gifts together and were excited to play our new games.  Thank you so very much!

Love, Mrs. Lopez

Counting 1,000

 It’s Math time! Why do we have pull tabs and toothpicks in Math?

    We collected pull tabs to try to get 1000. We collected so many we had to group them to make it easier to count. We worked in 4 table groups. At each table we put the pull tabs into groups of 10 to get a total for the table. Then we added the 4 table totals to get a whole class total. All together our class collected 2,200 pull tabs.

  For the toothpicks we had extras from a Thanksgiving turkey project. There were so many we decided to group them too. We made groups of 10 and put them in bags to make groups of 100. Then we counted the 100’s bags to get 1,250 total toothpicks.

   We discovered it was faster and easier to count large amounts by putting them in groups of 10 and 100.  You could try it with large amounts of paper clips or coins. Let us know how many you get. 


Written by Holly and Billy