Easing Back Into the Groove...

What a wonderful week off, and a wonderful week back. We started a new routine this week...writing down a few ideas of the GOOD we saw in our day. Here's a few glimpses:

In reading, we have continued to follow Bear's journey from the Woods to Col. Colbourn's acquisition. We are using our signposts to identify more about Bear's character and to find the struggle he faces throughout the book. Our Again and Again signpost has us asking, "Why does this keep coming up?" and leading us to some good predictions.

In ELA, we've been practicing more of our grammar with independent and dependent clauses, commas, conjunctions, and now quotation marks! Our writing is growing by leaps and bounds as we are able to craft complex sentences accurately with more confidence.

Third grade had a great time at Sauer-Beckmann Farm! We learned about the people and their way of life in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It's amazing to see how they have preserved it and even use those same methods today! Here are a few highlights!

In math we are all becoming division experts. We know how to use a variety of division notation to express division relationships and are becoming more familiar with the "rooftop" division symbol because it can help us use place value to divide bigger numbers more efficiently. 4th grade even started to use long division as a tool this week to divide 2 and 3-digit dividends - pretty exciting! 3rd grade has gotten lots of previews about how useful long division can be and our "short" division warm-ups had everyone noticing how you can divide, multiply equal groups, and subtract to find remainders.

SBLC scientists are learning about how water moves and changes through all of Earth's living and nonliving systems. We considered water's usefulness and the many places it's found around our planet, then thought more deeply about what causes water to change and how energy powers the water cycle. On Friday we used warm water, ice, and plastic wrap to model the water cycle and it turned out to be pretty exciting when the condensation cooled enough and we created rain!