Week of October 13

 Hi everyone, 

This week the weather had a mind of its own. We experienced significant rain (learning the word deluge first hand) to sunny, clear days of 70 degrees and back to a drizzle of rain on Friday. I am extremely proud of our third graders and how well they are handling the elements. On Tuesday, students worked hard on creating new waterways for the tarp drip-off, rerouting the flooding water, navigating obstacles along the way. Watching every student collaborate, problem-solve, and troubleshoot issues as they arose was simply amazing. They are an incredible group of students with strong minds and determined personalities. By the end of the week, students worked on writing more poetry within their journals, met in their reading groups, and completed activities in their math menu. Hopefully, you were able to check out their Seesaw accounts as well to see a sample of their writing. 

Questions to spark conversation:

1. What is the difference between a triangle, quadrilateral, and pentagon?

2.  How does water travel? How can you change its route?

3. What is your color of fall? Why did you choose this color?

4. What changes have you observed in the woods this week?

Here are some pictures from our week:

Best view at DBS

When telling these students I love where we live, one replied, 
"You can say that again!"

One of our classroom jobs asks students to find items from the forest to add to our museum display for the day. This wood slice was found!

A little drizzle did not stop these students from working around our campfire. 

Week of October 5, 2020

 This week was full of exploration, discovery, geometric shapes, and the beginning of reading groups. Throughout the week, students spent time exploring the brook. They found a small fish, frogs, and several new fungi species. In math this week, students worked through our math menu and learned about various polygons. Additionally, students were able to create equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangles out of natural materials.  In ELA, students began working in their reading groups. While working outside, it has been very important for students to demonstrate responsibility and willingness to stay on task without the direct supervision of an adult. This is no easy task, and I am very impressed with the amount of responsibility students have demonstrated toward their learning. Students have proven themselves to stay on task while working at their hammock spaces, in the field, and under our tarp space. Lastly, we ended our week with a day of play in celebration of earning over $1,500 Otter bucks! Students spent the day exploring new hills, creating imaginative games of wizardry and one group even deemed themselves part of a "survivor group", building their own fire pit and collecting rare wood crystal from blue fungus mined out of fallen logs. 

Questions to spark conversation:

1. What is the sledding hill? Describe it to me.

2. What changes have you noticed in the woods this week? Why are those changes happening?

3. What book are you reading in your reading group? Tell me about the book.

4. Can you build me an equilateral triangle? What makes it an equilateral triangle? What are its attributes?

Here are some pictures from the week:

Warming up in the sun during Math Menu

Building Isosceles triangles

Playing "Skunk"

We found a fish!

Our new fire circle!

Climbing the sledding hill

Our stuffies joined our adventures on Friday!

This "survival" crew built their own fire circle, complete with rocks from the brook and dry sticks. 

Week of Sept 28, 2020

 Welcome to all of our new Rock Star families! Moving forward, this blog will be used to share pictures of our learning throughout our weeks together. Last week, in math we focused on identifying various 2-dimensional shapes and their attributes. Using these classifications, we then built the shapes ourselves. In writing, we focused our attention on building a strong paragraph, which begins with a leading statement. With the rain, students also spent a lot of their time exploring the brook and discussing the changes that happened within our forest classroom. Students discovered one part of the brook was not flowing as easily as another section. They immediately went to work problem-solving ways to un-dam the brook and reroute the waterway. 

Here are some pictures from the week: