Our class has reading buddies in Mrs. Sizemore's first grade class. We will meet on Fridays almost every week to share books.

Sometimes the first grade buddies read and sometimes the third grade buddies read.

Either way, it's always fun!

Our class started swimming lessons at the YMCA this week. After the students showed the instructors what they can do, groups were formed. Some kids worked with kickboards:

Some other groups worked on breathing and swimming underwater:

This group is waiting for instructions about jumping in off the blocks:

We're off to a great start in swimming!

We did some writing this afternoon and worked with a partner to make revisions. Our partners asked us questions which helped us add more details to our paragraphs.

We wrote about our lunches. Ask your child to make up a sentence about dinner the way we made a paragraph about lunch.

Some students helped me write this sentence about my lunch: I gulped down a mouth-watering tomato, pesto and mozzarella sandwich.

Just so you don't think it's all work, all day, here is a picture of some of us enjoying Four Square on the playground:

We are beginning a study of plants in science. At the end of second grade, we planted sunflowers and today we investigated them.

We observed several different kinds of sunflowers and noted how they are the same and how they are different.

We sketched sunflowers in our science notebooks.

Next week we will dissect sunflowers and paint a sunflower piece in art class.

We had a great first day of school today! We spent the morning getting to know each other, organizing classroom supplies, playing at recess and eating lunch. After lunch, Mrs. Siebert came in to work with us on the "U.S. Map Song".

Here we are practicing our serious pre-performance faces:

We went to art and decorated portfolios for the year:

If you click on the photos, they will open as a larger file. Please leave us a comment and let us know that you stopped by. We will update this blog with photos and student writing throughout the year.

Our class visited the Cobblestone Market yesterday to talk with some vendors about economic principles. It was interesting to learn about soap making, jam and preserves, goat milk products, and bread baking. The students met a baby pig that was four days old!

Our students asked questions such as, "What are the byproducts of soap-making?" and "What expenses do you have when you make jam?" They learned that the cost of the glass jars that the jam is packaged in, plays a role in the price of the jam.

Students shopped individually but we also bought a loaf of quinoa maple bread and blueberry preserves to try in class. Yummy!

We had a visit from Laura Frazier and one of her Jacob sheep this week.

Laura is a local fiber artist who is working with our class during our economics unit. She will be discussing using renewable resources, setting a price for products and other economic principles. For now, the kids loved seeing the sheep and learning about shearing!

We have been picking lettuce from our Renaissance Garden with Mrs. Kinnamon and yesterday were able to get our first radishes!

Tomorrow we'll have some 3rd grade salad. Yum!

Our class has been finishing up the Harlem Renaissance unit by dancing to jazz from the time period with Mrs. Adams.

They did a great job keeping the beat and remembering choreography!

In math, we've been using wooden blocks and Unifix Cubes to design arrays. This has helped everyone see fact families in action as we move into practicing division.

It also helped us to "see" how a square number can have an array in the shape of a square!

Check us out! We've been very busy. Here is a sample of what we did today.

We've been working on drama games with Mr. Bob as a way to prepare for our performance of The Magic Flute next month. Here we are challenging each other to a variation of "rock, paper, scissors":

In this game, Mr. Bob makes strange noises while a group of students move their bodies and faces with the noise:

The Bunnicula reading group presented their Wanted posters to the class:

We have a talented guitar player in our class who played a medley of Renaissance music to go along with our social studies unit: