Five For Friday {3.14.14}

And I'm late to the party again... :)  Here's to Friday... even though it's Saturday!  Wow, it's been a great week for us in third grade, and I'm excited to see what everyone else has been up to! I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for teaching today for the weekly Five For Friday Post!  

Of course it wouldn't be a weekly post without a math expressions update!!!  We've been busy working with addition and subtraction strategies as I've shared with you all lately.  This week our focus was on math mountains and how to use them for all 4 basic operations.  My colleague set up a banalce scale and had some fun with giving students different equations to show if they were equal or not so when I saw how fun it was, I asked her to borrow it!  The kids loved playing with the sclae and discussing numbers.  The best part was that we did mystery numbers where I wrote equations on whiteboards and only told one person.  They had to put the answer on the scale, and the reat of the class had to guess the equation.  It helped us discuss the different varaiations of numbers that could be possible.  

We also did a lot of discussion with not equal as well, which was something new to them.  :) 

In guided reading groups I started a non-fiction book called Knights & Castles.  It's a companion book to go along with the Magic Tree House books.  I don't typically do this, but I'm using the same book with each of my groups--we're just doing different things depending on their levels.  We end the year with a non-fiction pioneer simulation so this is just like a jump start to get them used to some of the things that we will be doing.  The kids are loving this book and so do I.  We've been doing a lot of discussion, as well as working on graphic organizers to talk about the information that we're reading.  We've been doing some together, and they've been doing some on their own.  Here is some of our work.

Each chapter comes with a flip book to make to review the content of the chapter. Here are a few finished ones from this week!

We've been working with homophones this week and I used this great book called 'Dear, Deer' to use as a mentor text.  We had fun reading the book and if you haven't used it I suggest you take a look!

In our centers we made homophone books.  Students picked a pair of homophones out of a basket and then created a page for our book.  Here are a few that were finished up.  We're excited to read our book hopefully to our buddy class next time we meet!  The kids were very creative, and I'm excited with how they turned out!

We've finally had some warmer weather here in Wisconsin.... it hasn't been amazing, but still just enough to make us realize that there is an end to this polar vortex of a winter that we have had.  With that being said, I wanted to share another sunrise picture from this week.  I just love when it takes my breath away, and makes me stop to smell the roses! Oh how easy it is to get wrapped up in the hustle bustle of everyday life!!!

On a personal note, we got our final piece of furniture for the nursery this week.  A rocking chair!!!  It feels great to have everything set now.  We're just waiting on baby! :)  I'm still several weeks away, but things are coming together nicely at this point! I'm excited for the memories that I will make it that very seat!

I hope everyone has a great weekend!! :)