Welcome Back

I trust everyone had a wonderful and relaxing break. I spent the week meeting friends for coffee, staying up late, sleeping in, reading, and practicing calligraphy (thanks, #5's Mom!) I even managed to get in quite a few runs. This was especially important given how horribly my students spoiled me with chocolate goodies at our Valentine's Day party. Speaking of this, a huge thank you to #21's Mom, Mrs. S. for organizing such a great breakfast for the class. Such goodies. Thank you, too, to all our wonderful parent volunteers who showed up to make the breakfast a huge success and to everyone who contributed a breakfast item. We had a wonderful time, as you can see.

 And finally, a huge thank you to our wonderful custodian, Mr. Pavel for cleaning up our room after the festivities.

It wasn't all fun and games, though. We actually squeezed in some learning as well.

Literacy/Social Studies- We combined these two subject areas in our research project on the Great Wave of Immigration that occurred between 1880 and 1920. With help from Mrs. F, our wonderful librarian, we learned how to access a variety of online resources to help us appreciate the immigrant's perspective. We divided ourselves into five different country groups; Norway, Italy, Ireland, China, and Mexico and worked in our groups to research the country's history and geography in order to understand what motivated people during that time period . We researched a variety of books to help understand the challenges of immigration. In our culminating lesson, we worked in our country groups to complete a cost/benefit analysis for a fictional family trying to decide whether or not to immigrate. Students earned "passports" from the they researched.
CCSS-Reading Informational Text 3:1-10

Math- We have continued our work with multi-digit subtraction with regrouping also known as borrowing. Ultimately, our goal is to become proficient in using the standard algorithm. However, to ensure that we understand why this algorithm works, and in order to understand the role place value has when using this algorithm, we are first practicing with expanded form. We are also using proof drawings to explain, or to prove, the accuracy of our work.

CCSS-Math 3NBTA1