3A: A Week at a Glance
week ending January 29, 2016
A Note From Mrs. Adams
Scholastic Spare Change Drive to go toward books for our classrooms:
Monday - pennies
Tuesday - nickels
Wednesday - dimes
Thursday - quarters
Friday - all spare change
"Soup"er Bowl ... our student council is running a SuperBowl fundraiser. Please donate cans of soup all next week. Each can of soup allows your child to vote for the winning SuperBowl team. Bring as many cans as you'd like to donate!
Next Friday, February 5th, wear your favorite sports team/colors gear.
Math Rocks!
This week in school we learned about fantastic fractions! We learned a lot and it was busy but fun!! Mrs. Adams taught us that if the numerator and denominator are the same, it equals one whole. Fractions are hard, but Mrs. Adams always makes it fun. She always challenges us to do our best!!! We learned about fractions in a set, and it was tricky. She even gave us a challenge that we all finished! It was tricky, but if you practice A LOT then it becomes easy. Do you know what equivalent fractions are? Well, if you don't, it means fractions that are equal to each other. Did you know that if the numerator is half the denominator, the fraction is equal to one half? Fractions can be hard, but fun, too!
Exploding with Science
Has your brain ever been bulging with ideas? Well Mrs. Adams' class was with our latest science experiments! This week in 3A, our class was working with chemicals again. Each pair of students received a bucket with 5 unknown chemicals in 5 different containers labeled with different colors so we could tell them apart. We also received goggles, cups of water, petri dishes, and coffee filters for each color chemical. We put 3 scoops of each chemical in 10mL of water. Then we observed to see if it was a solution (which dissolves) or a suspension (cloudy and doesn't dissolve). After observing, we poured the chemical and water into a coffee filter that was labeled with the color chemical, and we let it drip into the petri dish. We continued this experiment with each color. We're going to observe what happens to each chemical after it dries. We had fun with this experiment and look forward to the next one!
Homophones
This week was really neat. In school we learned about homophones. That means two words that sound alike, but are spelled different and mean different things. For example, the number TWO and TOO like "me, too" and TO, like I went "to" the store. Even our spelling words are homophones. Other examples are sea and see, eyes and I, and hi and high. Then we had fun by writing our own homophone stories with other rhyming words. We had fun "righting", I mean "WRITING" our homophone stories!
Writing
You've seen them in stories, paragraphs, and newspapers... they're VIGNETTE'S! A vignette (vin-yet) is a small story that gives an action, but is written in an information book. You may see a vignette in a story that is written by a kid, or maybe in a story written by a famous writer. Not many people have heard about vignette's but we have in 3A! You're lucky to know what it is!
Here's Mrs. Adams' example...
SMACK! The ball goes sailing over the field and out into the woods. The crowd cheers with excitement as you gallop from base to base.
Have you ever hit a ball so far that it went beyond the field? This is called a home run. (The rest of this chapter would be all about hitting home runs!)
The vignette is the first paragraph... the small story that hooks a reader into wanting to learn about the topic.