Welcome to 3rd and 4th grade! We have been learning so many things these first few weeks of school, especially Mrs. Yox, who is a first year teacher. We can’t wait to tell you about them!
Our day starts with Language Arts rotations, which includes our new spelling words for the week, new vocabulary, and a new story that we read as a class. There are three different spelling groups in our class, and our students got to choose the names of their spelling groups! Their names are Team Beau Bear, Team Iron Man, and Team Fat Fluffy Unicorns. Our favorite story that we have done so far was The Ballad of Mulan which we got to compare and contrast with the Disney movie version of the same story. There were a lot of similarities, but so many more differences.
In math, both third and fourth grade have been working on reading bar graphs, line graphs, and pictographs. We just started learning about place value to the hundreds and thousands, which proved to be difficult for all of us, because of the way we had to think about it, such as “How many hundreds are in 3,000.” How many groups of 100 are there in 3,000? If your answer was 30, you are correct!
In science, we just planted our seeds, which are starting to sprout and we are so excited to see which of our plants will do well in our classroom! We are also learning about the parts of a flower and the parts of a seed, so our plants go well with what we are learning about. In social studies, we just learned about the different regions in the United States and even got to come up with our own country and determine where its regions were and what kind of weather they had there. We have also started to talk about weather and in the coming weeks will talk about climate and the way we are treating the Earth.
Speaking of the Earth, we just learned how God created the universe in six days and what he did each day. We also learned about our fall into sin, and how God fixed that by sending his son, Jesus, to die for our sins and make us free in Him.
We have some really exciting things to look forward to in the next coming weeks, such as a trip to the outdoor classroom in Madrid, the Tap Explosion show in Des Moines, and of course the re-potting of our plants. One of the big things we are working on in third and fourth grade is being responsible and independent, and also following directions. We look forward to all that we will learn this year and are so excited to see how we grow as a class and as brothers and sisters in Christ.