THIRD GRADE PEAK NEWS
November 12, 2014
A Quick Note
It was wonderful to meet with you all during conferences. I truly enjoy working with your kids each and every day. Please feel free to reach out at any time that you have questions or concerns. I am really proud of all the hard work the kids are putting forth during PEAK.
Our PEAK Day
Theme Study
Enrichment Centers
Topic Study: Students continue to work through their independently chosen topic studies. We have kiddos video taping magic tricks to analyze their performances, learning sign language, following written directions to create puppet and pop-ups, summarizing Greek myths, learning and drawing cartoon effects, creating VanGogh inspired paintings, studying marine life and Jack Prelutsky poetry. We've got it all covered! Our hope is to take many of these pieces to a final product to share with you later this year.
Science: Most recently, the kids have been experimenting with series and parallel circuits. We continue to emphasize scientific diagrams and written explanations that share observations with scientific terminology. Our central focus is always working through the scientific method.
Personal Growth and Development/Creativity
We also worked on our creative thinking skills in recent weeks as we learned about deductive and divergent thinking. In deductive thinking, we are using clues to find one and only one answer...often putting more than one clue together in order to find the needed information to solve the problem. In divergent thinking, there are many correct responses and it is important to be able to see ordinary things in new and unusual ways. The kids enjoyed activities practicing these critical thinking skills.