"Poetry? I thought you teach math?!"

Many students (eventually, adults) dislike or are disinterested in math because they see it as boring and limited-- problems assigned in textbooks/homework, or as just another subject learned in school. One of my goals is for your student to enjoy math, to see it as relevant and useful in everyday life outside of school, perhaps even interesting, as we discover patterns and challenge ourselves to "solve puzzles and mysteries". This year, I have started integrating more literature and reading comprehension strategies into our math workshop. One of my favorites has been our poem of the week. Each week, I select a poem with mathematical connections. At dismissal, we've been reading and interacting with the poems each day to help us practice the skill of visualizing, which is crucial to problem solving. Mondays I read the poem aloud, then the students join in the reading. Tuesdays we focus on unknown vocabulary terms. Wednesdays we look for a math skill connected to the poem. Thursdays we interact with the poem through movements or assigning parts (the students love this!). Fridays we practice visualizing-- brainstorming what we "see" and illustrating the poem.

I look forward to sharing more ways we're making math meaningful and igniting our curiosity and sense to wonder. Today was also Jaguar Spirit Day!

Stay tuned! Soon we'll be using football to continue building our number sense. Have a great weekend! :-)

OPEN HOUSE REMINDER

A blue note was sent home indicating that our OPEN HOUSE date has been changed. We will have open house on SEPTEMBER 13th! Thank you for helping this to be a great start to the year. We look forward to talking with you about our expectations and answering questions. It's going to be a great year.

Our Fabulous First Day!

Our day started with all 42 students (20 Kirkham/22 Remley) present and on time! :-) After dropping off school supplies, we got right into our warm-up, which was getting started on our Me By The Numbers Project (students will finish their poster for homework and return to class Friday). We set up our S.T.A.R. (Students Taking Academic Responsibility) Notebooks, went over CHAMPs and conduct expectations, toured the classroom and school, started this week's Daily Geography for social studies, and even got into math workshop. We even made it outside for recess until the rain came! We hope your first day was as successful as we thought it was. What was your favorite part? (We love to read your comments, so please talk with your student, and post them below!)

Welcome!

This year will be my ninth year teaching third grade at our school, and I am super excited to be teaming with Ms. Kirkham for the first time. We go all the way back to 2005 when she taught third grade for a few years. For your enjoyment, here are a few blasts from our past: The Recess Queen and Goldilocks, Book Character Dress-Up Day, 2005

Faculty Christmas Party, 2006

Make sure you enter your e-mail address in the box to the right to follow our blog by e-mail, so you can stay on pace with us this year. If we didn't see you at today's Meet and Greet, we look forward to meeting you on Monday!

Great states books

Here are a few books the students have enjoyed during our "road trip" across the country. I was only able to share snippets from them, but you may want to check out from the public library this summer:

Our final destination will be the Southwest states (Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas) before we head back to Jacksonville for the SUMMER (3 1/2 more school days, but who's counting? :-)). Students will be quizzed on this region Wednesday June 6. Our students have been loving geography! If your student is a reluctant reader, you might want to check out books on the North American countries we didn't get to: Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, The Bahamas, and Jamaica. They also love biographies and were really interested in finding out about different famous people from the states we studied.

End of the Year Celebration

All of the third grade classes celebrated their hard work this year by spending the day together at Russell Park in Atlantic Beach. We rotated among seven stations and had a blast playing crab soccer, soaking our classmates at the sponge toss, and participating in many fun challenges and relay races. Thanks to all of the parents who volunteered and came to visit!

Group picture!

Even Gators and Seminoles worked together!

Wait...no hands!

It's all about the face.

Wait, that didn't work so well...

A little better...

Now we're working smarter, not harder!

A little down time on the tires

The perfect treat for a hot day-Rita's Italian Ice!

Mall of America

Today, we stopped by a human-made landmark, Mall of America, while in Minnesota.

We tied in some math (mental, decomposing/composing numbers, algorithm) by figuring out how many restaurants and stores are in the St Johns Town Center (using a directory list to find the total, 156) and comparing it to how many are in Mall of America (520) to find the difference. Next week, we will use our time at the Mall of America to learn a little bit about economics (introduce income, budget, opportunity cost, competition, scarcity, just to name a few).