Students began their research with great enthusiasm. Each student has selected an insect and we wrote the rough draft for the appearance portion of the report on Friday. We will continue next week with the other sections of the report. Your child may do research on his or her own at home, but the writing of the rough draft takes place at school. At the end of the week students will have a completed rough draft. They will bring it home and work on their final copy for homework over spring break and the week following spring break. The final copy of the report will be due on Friday, April 10. Also, students will be using the information they learned while writing their report to create a diorama to go with their report. This will be on display at open house. Dioramas are due on Friday, April 21.
In math our focus this week has been on reading and writing 3-digit numbers. We learned about place value and how to identify numbers as hundreds, tens, and ones. We used 0 to 1000 charts to find ten more and ten less of a 3-digit number and 100 more and 100 less as well. We discovered how to show a 3-digit number in standard, expanded, unit, base ten, and word form. Also, we used sticker notation (sheets, strips, singles).
A thorough understanding of place value is one of the crucial building blocks for students to develop computational fluency. To support the development of fluency we play a number of mathematical games such as Close to 100 and Capture 5. These games offer repeated practice with adding and subtracting 100s, 10s, and 1s.
We created amazing art work inspired by the artist Piet Mondrian. You will see the product of their creative efforts at open house. In the meantime, ask your child what he or she learned about the artist and what inspired his art. This art lesson was brought to you by one of our very generous classroom volunteers. You can watch the video below to get a preview of what you might see at Open House.