Friday, September 14th, 2018

Before morning announcements Justin had some fun using our base ten blocks to build a tower.

Inquiry into Language: 
After morning announcements we began to work on the following two pages of cursive writing which brought us to letter d and combining the better d with the previous letters we've practiced. By the end of the weekend we should all have completed up to page 9 in our cursive writing book. Shortly after some class time to work on this we continued to read our novel study together by reading Chapter 4: Christmas. We took turns reading the pages in this chapter.

French: Visit Mme. Stella's blog to see what we did in French today!

Language continued: 
After French we completed our lesson 1 spelling test. Our spelling test notebooks will go home on Monday for parents/guardians to sign and return to school. Once we finished our spelling tests we completed reading Chapter 4. For Novel Study homework we are to complete the Venn Diagram that compares the Ingall's Christmas to our school. If we do not celebrate Christmas we can compare and contrast this to another holiday that we celebrate.
In addition to this we discussed our Reading Comprehension that will be assigned every weekend. Every weekend each student will be assigned a book to read on Raz Kids and will be required to answer the comprehension questions that go along with this book. This question worksheet is in our green reading comprehension duo tang. At the beginning of this duo tang is a list of questions for parents/guardians to ask your child to help them better comprehend the stories they read. It provides you with questions you can ask before, during and after reading.

RECESS/LUNCH

Inquiry into Math:
In todays class we learned about "estimating sums". We discussed the different vocabulary that is used when we have to estimate something, such as "about how much/many..." or "approximately how much/many..." and how this impacts the steps we take to answer the question. I expressed the importance behind closely reading what we are asked to do as this will impact what we have to do. If it asks us to estimate we should not be finding the exact answer, we should use one of the strategies discussed below to estimate. We all know that when we estimate our numbers should always end in 0-- it should never be a different digit.

We recalled how one of the strategies we can use when we are "estimating" is rounding. Briefly we reviewed this and we all did a fantastic job identifying when we have to round up and round down. We then learned a new strategy called "Front-end estimation". This strategy gives us a better estimation compared to rounding strategy alone.

To do Front-end estimation:
1. Add the values of your first digits from each number
     ex. 357 + 218
           300 + 200 = 500
2. Round the remaining digits to the nearest ten
        57 rounds up to 60,  18 rounds up to 20
        60 + 20 = 80
3. Add your answer from step 1 to your answer from step 2 and this gives you your front end estimation
        500 + 80 = 580

We did a couple examples of this together and we were encouraged to practice both of these strategies in our questions.
We also reflected on some thinking questions such thinking of two numbers that when estimated add up to a sum of ____. We used the sum 500. Some of the sets of numbers we got were
-  249 and 251-- 249 rounds down to 200 and 251 rounds up to 300 so 200 + 300 = 500
-  370 and 70-- 370 rounds up to 400 and 70 rounds up to 100, so 400 +100= 500
In addition to this we looked at how we can determine whether an estimate is too high or too low, and how many digits our estimate will be based on using front-end estimation and rounding. We all enjoyed coming up to demonstrate our understanding of this material.

** When we have word problems it's important that we show our work of how we got our answer, but we also have to remember to answer the question in a word sentence as shown above.

Unit of Inquiry
We continued with our Inside Pioneer homes worksheet with our partner. I loved seeing how we became more familiar with how to fill in these blanks by looking for key words that came in the sentence provided and went looking for these word in the text. It's so important that we are able to take information that we read and put it into our own words. Great team work Grade 3s!

Gym: Visit Ms. Yustin's blog to see what we did today!

HOMEWORK:
- Cursive writing: up to page 9
- Math: Ordering numbers worksheet (front and back)
- Novel study: Chapter 4 Venn Diagram
- Reading comprehension: Read assigned book and complete comprehension sheet
- Read for 25 minutes
- French

Happy Weekend!! :)