A Week in the Life of the Lily Pad

Phew! What a week it has been in the Lily Pad! We have been together for several weeks and are forming a more cohesive and collaborative community every day.

Hey, What happened to the teachers?!

Arrrgh! The Lily Pad and the rest of the third grade was invade by Pirates! Students donned their best pirate outfits and had fun embracing their inner pirate.  We began our day creating pirate names (like Captain Wreck Willy or Evil Eye Bonny) and then introduced ourselves to our fellow mateys.

Even the LMC director, Mrs. Heindel and our music teacher, Ms. Chusid, got into the fun reading pirate stories and singing pirate songs with the students.

Our Math Block
Along with working on practicing our time telling skills, students began their year long exploration of geometry, measurement, data collection and graphing.  All year we will infusing these math strands into our weekly math block.  Students enjoyed exploring with geometry manipulatives and creating our graphs.

This week was the debut of our special song for the chicken room. The students sang the song during the morning announcements and received rave reviews. I will upload a video of us singing it next week but here is a sneak peek at the lyrics.

Students have been busy, busy, busy during writer's workshop.  They have been collecting many seed ideas and learning about strategies writers use to create strong, well written personal narratives.  They have learned and are now practicing the art of zooming in on small moments, writing about exact, important details and are trying to create a "movie in the mind" of the reader.  We have some wonderful beginnings of strong personal narratives.  Next week students will be choosing one seed story to develop into a narrative to revise, edit and publish.

Science Block
We continue with our simple chemistry explorations, this week focusing on surface tension and the polarity of liquid molecules.  Students conducted trials to see how many drops of water fit on top of a penny.  The results were shocking a much different than initial predictions.

Students took their results and created a line plot, looking for outliers.  We then began creating a class line plot that we will examine and write observations.

Our next experiment explored how dish soap disrupted the molecular bonds of water by using milk (which has a high water content), food coloring and dish soap.  Students were amazed with the color explosions and had some interesting explanations about why the colors melded together.

As you can tell, a lot of learning and a lot of fun was had by the Lily Pad this week.  No wonder we are all tired by Friday!  Enjoy your weekend and if you can help us out for our pancake breakfast, let me know!

Upcoming Events

• MAPS testing - Wednesday, Sept 26, Thursday, Sept 27 and Wednesday Oct 3
• Friday, September 28 - the pancake breakfast
• Wednesday, October 17- field trip to the Farmer's Market
• Staff Development - No School October 25-26
• Photo Retakes - October 30