Mixing art and science

Last week we mixed art and science for our science unit on sea animals. The students got the chance to explore certain aspects, such as the characteristics, habitat, and diet of certain sea creatures, and teach each other about what they learned. Several groups also made some beautiful posters showing a lot of important information about their animals. At the end of the week, we used what we had learned to make a large-scale under-the-sea art piece, which was submitted to the Taos Fall Arts Festival.

Our daily Spanish classes continue to go well. We have a number of fun songs that everyone enjoys singing, which remind us about important Spanish words for numbers, colors and good morning greetings! Next week, we will continue learning numbers higher than 10, and practicing our basic math skills using only Spanish. We will also start to learn how to speak in complete sentences, ascribing attributes like color to certain basic objects. 

In other 3rd grade class news, our reading groups are starting to gain traction. The students have been keeping track of the books they read each week using reading trackers, and our Read-a-thon is already well underway, with part of our classroom decorated with individualized "feet" to describe the books we've read. Having mastered basic time concepts (everyone should be able to tell time on a real clock by now) we will start moving into concepts of place value and rounding in math over the next week. Later in September, we have a fun class trip coming up where we will go hiking with the local organization Rivers and Birds.