Coach BLeggett

Coach BLeggett

Friday, September 30, 2011

O.R.E.O. Project

Country Mouse, City Mouse Filming at Mill Valley

On Monday, we went to Mill Valley High School to film our movie from Country Mouse, City Mouse, a story we read in our Rigby books. The kids rewrote the story, created their own lines for their scripts, and broke up into scenes. The kids did a WONDERFUL job!


























Solar Cookout

We had a great time with our solar cookout. Thank you for donating all the supplies!

October 3-7

Curriculum October 3-7

Have a wonderful weekend! Enjoy this beautiful weather!
enVision Math
We completed Topic 3.  We will begin Topic 4 on Monday.  The scores are posted on the enVision website.  If your child scored below a 80%, they will receive reteaching on Topic 3 and retake the test. 
 
 Beginning Monday, I will send home subtraction and addition fact sheets.  There will be 100 of them.  They are to practice at home, but do not need to be returned to school.  The time is four minutes for addition and five minutes for subtraction.  They need to have 80% of the problems correct to receive a + on addition and subtraction for the quarter.
 
In Math next week, we will work on mmultiplication as repeated addition, arrays and multiplication, the commutative property, and writing multiplication stories.
 

Rigby Reading
We will begin Theme 4 this week.  The focus will be on synthesizing and inferring.
Synthesizing: Think about it as a puzzle.  Take pieces from the story and put them together to form a new idea.  It is like creating a puzzle.
Inferring: This is reading between the lines.  It is not what the author has said, but instead what they have implied.
 
We will be using these skills with Hispanic Heritage Month.  We will be reading and discussing significant individuals in this culture. 

Grammar- The focus will be on capitalization and punctuation.

Spelling
The Rigby words this week are an, book, teacher, two, afraid, explain, layer, crayon, eerie, and meant.
The extension focus is bi, which means two.
bicolor, bicuspid, bicycle, biennial, bifocals, bilingual, bimonthly, biped, biplane, and biweekly.
Science
We completed a unit on phases of the moon and stars.  Don't forget that the sky observation project is due on Monday, October 3.  You should have received the Blazing Insulated House project guidelines on Monday.  This is due Monday, October 24.

Social Studies
We will begin a unit on geography.  The students will be learning about types of maps, continents, oceans, and states.  Please mark Thursday, October 27 on your calendar.  This will be our 3rd grade Tourism Day.  This will be a culmination of an at school project where the students will focus on a specific state.
 
Writing
We will continue mini-lessons on voice, showing vs. telling, and figurative language in writing.  This will lead to a descriptive project we are doing with a class in Ohio.
 
We will also continue to work on our pen pal letters and e-mails with e-pals.  This week, we received a class letter from a school in San Rafael, California and e-mails from a class in Rochester, New York.  The students now have pen pals and
 e-pals in Germany, California, Georgia, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New York, and Kentucky.  There has been a lot of excitement over the exchanges and some very interesting classroom discussions about the similarities and differences. 
 
The school in Kentucky is a rural school with a small population, while the schools in California, New York, and Pennsylvania are all urban areas.  The schools in Georgia and Iowa are suburban.  The kids were able to translate their
e-mails between German and English.
 
The class has completed their Power of the Pen list, so we will begin writing a lot more letters to individuals from that list next week.
 
Have a wonderful week! :)


 

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Community Walk

Our community walk was successful. Different people expressed how touched they were from the red bandanas the kids distributed on the walk with the kind messages attached.  McDonalds went very well.  The kids quickly learned how important it was to apply tax when calculating the costs of their meals.  It was a great real-life learning experience!






Ava, MVP!!!


Ava's MVP!!! Ava is a very good friend.  She loves to dance.  Ava went to Hawaii this summer.  She likes potato soup, NOT tomato soup.  She went LOVES K-State, NOT KU!!! Ava has a lot of boos towards KU, but she is not disrespectful.  She is a LOYAL  Wildcat and very deserving of Team Leggett MVP!!!

By Team Leggett Publicists: Josie Taylor & Kenzie Harris

Curriculum September 26-30

Curriculum September 26-30

It was nice to have another beautiful weekend of weather. I hope that everyone had an enjoyable weekend.  Here is the curriculum update for the week.
enVision Math
We will focus on subtraction this week.  Models for subtracting 3-digit numbers, subtracting 3-digit numbers, subtracting across zero, and drawing a picture with a number sentence to work on problem solving.  We will take the Topic 3 test on Friday.
On Wednesday, we will focus on math through a hands-on project.  We will work with Oreos to determine the class max, min, median, range, and mean.  The kids will have two trials to see how high they can stack the Oreos.  This is a world-wide project where we will input our data and compare it with other participating classes throughout the world.

Rigby Reading
We will continue Theme 3 in Rigby this week. We will review asking questions and work on inferring. The students will be expected to read between the lines of what the author is implying in his or her writing.
On Monday, we will be walking to Mill Valley High School to film or movie "City Mouse & Country Mouse" a story the students rewrote from Rigby.

Grammar- The focus will be on subjects and predicates.

Spelling
The Rigby words this week are good, house, land, oh, whisper, whistle, thaw, children, shadow, establish.
The extension word focus is uni-one
unicellular, unicorn, unicycle, unidirectional, unify, unilateral, unique, unison, unit, unitard
Science
We will continue learning about the stars and the moon.  We will learn about different stars and the different phases of the moon.  Look for a project to come home on observing the stars.  Also, look for the solar house project.

Social Studies
We culminated our Communities unit with our community walk.  Also, we opened the Team Leggett store.  The kids learned about scarcity, inflation, consumer reports, wants vs. needs, and opportunity cost.  One of the important skills they had to apply was opportunity cost decision making.  It didn't look lik there was too much money saved!





We will begin a unit on geography next week.

Writing
We completed our narrative writing focus of our Memorable Vacation.  We will begin working on descriptive writing this week.  There will be mini lessons on showing vs. telling, figurative language in writing, and voice.
The kiddos learned how to use their e-mail accounts last week.  They received e-mails from their e-pals in Iowa and sent e-mails back to their e-pals in Germany.
Have a great week!

Monday, September 19, 2011

Adam, Team Leggett MVP

Adam is a smart kid. He is very funny. His favorite food is pizza. Adam has two favorite colors. They are blue and yellow. His favorite sport is soccer. He is great at math. He could answer a math question before you can Pizza Hut!

By Team Leggett Publicists Josie Taylor & Kenzie Harris

Solar Cookers

After experimenting with other solar cookers, the kids created their own solar cookers.  Thank you for all the supplies you sent in to help this project be successful. A special thank you to Mrs. Harris for coming in and helping us create the solar cookers.









Curriculum September 19-23

I hope that everyone had a great weekend. It looks like the weather will b much better this week for our solar cookers. We will go on our community walk on Thursday at 1:15 pm.

enVision Math
We will add with an expanded algorithm, look at models for adding 3-digit numbers, add 3-digit numbers, add 3 or more numbers, and draw a picture for problem solving.

Rigby Reading
We will begin Theme 3 in Rigby this week. We will review asking questions and work on inferring. The students will be expected to read between the lines of what the author is implying in his or her writing.

Grammar- The focus will be on subjects and predicates.

Spelling
The Rigby words this week are ball, day, up, what, alone, quote, polite, surprise, entire, and plague.
The focus of the extension list is poly-many.
polychromatic, polyclinical, polydactyle, polyglot, polygon, polygraph, polyhedron, polymorphous, polysyllabic, and polytheism.

Science
Last week, the students had to create their own science experiement with different solar cookers and lamps to simulate the sun. They were expected to use all steps of the scientific process in their experiement and raise their own questions that they wanted to discover. They were able to use foil, cheese, chocolate, candles, and black containers. They did a wonderful job of rising to the expectation of using their own inquiry to guide them through the lesson.

This week, we will have our solar cookout and begin looking at the moon and stars.


Social Studies
We will culminate our communities unit with a community walk. The students will walk throughout the community, while observing things that stand out to them. They will have to draw something from their community and discuss the importance of it. We will also go to McDonald's where the students can practice using real-world skills with money. In addition, we will begin our first month of our Pay it Forward initiative of the year.

Writing
We will publish our vacation papers this week and begin a mini-lesson on descriptive writing.

We will also begin using our e-pals e-mail addresses to write our e-pals in Germany back. The students received letters from Germany, Kentucky, and Georgia last week. They also wrote to their pen pals in Pennsylvania.

Have a great week!

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Earth Absorption & Solar Heaters

Here is a new video of our class and Miss Keith's working on earth absorption materials and solar heaters.

Charring Paper with Solar Energy

In Science, we learned how to char paper.  The students used their converging lens to capture the focal point of the sunlight.    They were able to see how the dark color absorbed the energy.  When the solar heat was concentrated at a small point, they were able to char the paper.