The New Mac Lab

Our old Dell computer lab was crowded with wires going every which way and big monitors. Sometimes kids would accidentally pull a wire and the computers would shut off. Now everything is organized. The new Macintosh laptops are white and the lab was setup right before Winter Break. Our first week back to school we met with Mr. Johnson and Ms. Harding to get an introduction to the computers and lab. We each have to log in using our lunch number. This is our password and username. We do not use accessory mice, instead we just use the touch pad on the computer. This is how you move around the screen and click. The whole lab looks and feels lighter now that the computers are white instead of black. The room seems bigger too - without all those big desktop Dell computers.

Creating a Pictograph

Last week the third graders created a large pictograph in the hallway. We learned that one of the most important parts of any pictograph is the KEY, which tells you how much each symbol is worth.

Organizing the Food

After school on Monday we had to organize all the food into boxes for families to pick up this week. We had help from the following third graders: Caleb, Connor, Jack, Adam, Parker, and Kelsey. Here are some pictures of the process of organizing 1,115 cans/boxes:

Graphing on the Computer

The last two weeks in the computer lab we have been learning to graph using this website:

http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createAgraph/

Here are some examples of our graphs:

Our Food Drive

The Third Grade Food Drive ended on Friday. Below you can see a graph of each group to see how many cans each class we were responsible for brought in.

Here is a chart we made of all the mathematical information the third grade gathered related to the Food Drive. We spent most of math today together trying to use efficient strategies to find the totals.

As you can see, the total cans/boxes the third grade collected was 1,115! The food was organized after school on Monday and will be distributed to families tomorrow.

Historical Perspective

This is a picture from the book A River Ran Wild by Lynne Cherry. It is one of the few pictures with people in it. As we were reading it, Liam made some inferences about what the characters were probably thinking and saying to one another. We discussed body language and other visual clues. We were learning to read a picture. Students were then invited to record their own ideas about what these people were thinking and saying to one another. This invitation helped us begin to better understand different voices in history and the effect that exploration had on the Native Americans. 

Here is Tenly's perspective writing. Notice how her ideas here connect to her writing in the next blog post.

A River Ran Wild

This is the third book we've read by Lynne Cherry. We notice that she seems to like writing stories about the environment. Lynne Cherry’s book A River Ran Wild takes readers through the history of New England's Nashua River--how it was respected by generations of Indians, overtaken by early European setters, polluted in the wake of the industrial revolution, and restored in recent years through the efforts of concerned citizens. We read it a few times. The second time we paused to record burning questions. Using this list of question students were invited to create a paper blog post, sharing their thinking (not a summary) about any part of the story or issue that really stuck out to them. Students understood that their peers would be reading and commenting on their post, which made the audience real and immediate.

Here is Tenley's post:

Here are some of the comments Tenley received on her blog post from other students (and me!):

Repsonding to each other's ideas is getting us ready to have meaningful discussions about books when we get back after winter break. We are learning a lot about what it means to write someone a "thought provoking comment."