"Two men walked into the rainforest. Moments before the forest had been alive..."

"with the sounds of squawking birds and howling monkeys." Wouldn't this grabber lead make you want to keep reading? Lynne Cherry's lead sure made us want to keep reading her book The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rainforest. After we read, we took a closer look at how Lynne Cherry's crafted - or built - her story. We wanted to know how she used language to draw us into the story so we chose our favorite sentences from the book, the sentences that really spoke to us as readers. Ella's thoughtful sentence choices impressed all of us. You can read them below. Also, check out the Million Dollar Word Bank she decided to create with words just from this story!

Ella's Great Kapok Tree
Million $$ Word Bank

 

Cans, cans, and MORE cans!

We can hardly believe the second week of our Food Drive is almost over! We're so thankful to all of the amazing Stony Point kids who've been carrying in these heavy cans of food for the past two weeks. The boxes in our hallway are pretty close to overflowing which means we've had a LOT of adding to do. Every day we add the totals from Ms. Bindas, Mrs. Laubscher, and Ms. Payne's classes to find our grand total. We've tried a few different strategies for finding the sums of numbers over the past week. Look below to see some quality examples of different addition strategies we tried...

CJ decided to try a new "Ones & Tens" strategy

Max decided to "upgrade" the Ones & Tens strategy we tried

Mallory added two numbers with mental math,
then took the sum and added the next number...efficient!

Lainey also decided to use the Ones & Tens strategy

Ty'onte created her own strategy for checking
her accuracy using check-marks

Food Drive 2011

Yesterday kicked off the 3rd grade's annual Food Drive! (Info above just incase you haven't heard!) All of our preparation before Thanksgiving Break paid off as we collected lots of cans and boxes from every classroom yesterday. Before break we prepared a speech for every class in the school to inform them about the Food Drive and encourage them to bring in canned and boxed items. We also created a bar graph to go outside of each room to keep them updated on their class progress. Here we are preparing and practicing our speeches and creating our graphs...

Ty'onte and Macy read over their speech for
Mr. Matt's 1st graders

Kristina, CJ, and Kirsten put the finishing touches on their
speech for Mrs. Burnette's class

Lainey reads over her and Max's speech for Ms. Braun's class

Ginger and Ella practice the speech they'll read
to Ms. Laubscher's class

Ella, Henry, and Dylan get the bar graph ready
for Ms. Bolton's 5th grade learning cottage

Check back SOON to see the totals from our first day of food collecting!

T-Shirts for the Wildlife Center

In Math Workshop, our latest challenge was to help raise money for the Virginia Wildlife Center with t-shirts for each animal species. It was up to our class to figure out how the t-shirt company could most efficiently ship the t-shirts in boxes of 100, rolls of 10, or just one-by-one as loose t-shirts. We needed to find 3 different possibilities for how to ship the t-shirts. Here's what Ella thought was the most important information in this problem to help us solve it.

 Different kids in our class found different strategies to help them solve. We noticed that, although there were different strategies to solve, everyone in our class created a KEY to explain the symbols they used.

Ella's Thinking

 Ella decided in her second solution to trade in the box of 100 shirts for 10 rolls of 10 shirts. In her third solution, Ella didn't have any more boxes to trade in so she traded in a roll of 10 shirts for 10 loose shirts.

CJ's Thinking

You can see that CJ used a strategy that was a little different than Ella's strategy. For his third solution, he decided to trade in his box of 100 shirts for 10 rolls of 10 and trade in all of his rolls of 10 for loose shirts. That makes 63 loose shirts!  

Lainey's Thinking

Lainey's thinking shows that she found the pattern that occurs when you trade in rolls of 10 for loose shirts. Can you see the pattern? (As the rolls decrease by 1, the loose shirts increase by 10.) 

Rainforest Populations and Communities

population: all the members of a single type of organism in an ecosystem

Last week, to help with an art project we started with Mary Lou, we researched and sketched plant and animal species that live in the rainforest. After we learned what a population was this week, Miss Payne challenged us to try and sort all of our plant and animal sketches into populations that live in the rainforest.

First, we sorted our sketches into 2 categories: plants and animals. We decided those 2 groups weren't exactly populations, so we tried sorting them into 4 categories: plants, insects, mammals, and birds. Still, we realized that populations are made up of only a single type of organism. Hmmm....

Finally, we sorted our producers into 3 populations: trees, ferns (we're not quite sure if the trees and ferns are all exactly the same species...but we're pretending they are!), and orchids. Below you'll see a populations of skunks, three-toed sloths, tree kangaroos, and leopards.

community: all the living things in an ecosystem

After organizing our plants and animals into populations, we tried to organize them into a community, showing how the energy passed from the producers to the herbivores (three-toed sloths, tree kangaroos, and skunks) and then on to our one carnivore - the leopard!

Orchid population

You'll see here that the energy passed from the orchids to the butterflies, then from the butterflies to the macaws and the chameleon. Come by our room if you'd like to see the WHOLE rainforest community on our window! 

Hiking

By Kristina

A post card came in the mail saying that some men were going walking on the Rocky Moutains.

So then the men got their stuff together and  they all started  to walk.

Then they got tuckered out  and slept on the cold snow.

Lost in Antartica

by Ginger

One day 8 people were sent to Antartica to find interesting stuff.

The next day they got lost and needed to find shelter to survive.

Luckily they had big backpacks filled with food and supplies and one day they finally found their way back looking hideous.

Lots of Flamingos

By Mallory

All the flamingos gatherd up one of them said we need to go to the forest now.

All the flamingos  went to the forest and they found a pound and Billy the youngest flamingo spotted a little spot were they could go eat.

All the flamingos agreed on going to the spot so they did go to the spot and they had a awesome party!

The Snow Day

By CJ  

People are going gliding across the snow to get to the mountains.

The skiers made it to the mountain and the first person who made it there saw hard, snowy rocks.

When they skied down the mountain they were so fast they couldn't stop so they crashed into a gigantic snow pile.

Pink Birds

By Lainey

Many flamingos all in a row flew down to have some shrimp.

While they were there some fought over shrimp, some sat on an egg, some played in the water, some looked at the red wild flower.

They flew off when a Jeep came by.

Flamingos

By Max

A bunch of pink and orange flamingos flew south for the winter. 

 They saw a small a clump of land in the middle of a pond.

They were feeling kind of tired so they went to rest; after that they went flying again.

Butterfly

By Ella

I was working in the garden and I saw a treasure chest!

I opened it and I saw MILLIONS of beautiful gems then something really weird happened!

My mom caught a butterfly that looked like it had eyes on it then its two real eyes winked at me so I think it seemed magical (and it was, well, that's what I thought).

Exploring Antarctica

By Henry

Lots and lots of men were lost in Antartica.      

They had not eaten in weeks.

Many died, a few lived, but the survivors came to many ENORMOUS mountains that were covered in slippery ice that was impossible to climb but the men who were left tried to climb them.

Eight Men

By Ty'onte

Eight men were traveling from home to see a new country to see different things.

When the eight men got to the new country they saw a lot of different things like snow and giant rocks in the mountains.

Finally they went home to eat some more fish and get in the covers.

The Girl That Found a Bird

by Jamaine

Nine-year-old Jessie moved to a new home and she saw this animal path.

Jessie went in the path and saw this reddish robin. Jessie said "Why isn't it flying?" but then Jessie saw why it wasn't flying.

It had a broken wing so Jessie's mom drove her to the Wildlife Center where they gave him some x-rays and bird food.

One Interesting Day

by Samantha


One interesting day me and my group set off to go and ski and just then we all froze as the wind goes by.  

I was still walking in the bright white snow not knowing what happened.  

So I kept and kept walking until I found out I was lost and I was never heard about again.

Flamingo Flock

By Macy

There was a weird looking bird that was magic and he was spying on the flamingos.

The flamingos did not notice the bird and the bird made the flamingos do crazy stuff like poke each other and make the birds get mad at each other.


The flamingos figured out that there was a mystery.

Annnnd the official Strongest Structure from Room 21 is.......

The low-to-the-ground triangular prism built by Max and Ty'onte! Max and Ty'onte's triangular prism successfully held 260 grams before it leaned and sent the weights tumbling to the ground. You can take a look at the picture below and tell that Ty'onte and Max thought about supporting the vertices of their structure by wrapping the pipe cleaners around the tape holding the vertices together.  

Max and Ty'onte's structure held 260 grams

You can also tell Max and Ty'onte thought about making their structure short because "if it was tall it might bend over more easily, but it couldn't be too short or else it wouldn't be 3-dimensional!" said Max. They both worked hard on making their structure the best it could be. Check out the other designs from the talented architects and builders in our class: 

Dylan and Macy's triangular prism 180 grams

Lainey and Jamaine's structure held 24 grams

Ella and Henry's fortified structure held 127 grams

Unfortunately, Ginger and CJ's structure had an accident!
(0 grams held)

Everyone thought this would be a BREEZE! Many groups built a structure they thought would be super strong, but - dun, dun, dunnnn - they found out the hard way it wasn't as strong as they thought. Everyone deserves a good pat on the back for determination with this challenge.

Building...Rethinking...Rebuilding 3-D Structures

Building our 3-D structures has officially BEGUN! Armed with only 15 straws, 5 pipe cleaners, and 3 feet of tape (because building materials are expensive in the real world!) we set out to make the strongest 3-D structures possible. The strength of our structures will be tested by stacking gram weights on top of a square of mat board that our structure MUST be able to support.

Henry and Ella thought about why their design
would be strong

Ginger and CJ's design plan

We're realizing that the original design plans we had need to be revised! Even though we know the triangle is the strongest polygon, it has still been tricky to figure out how to incorporate the triangle into our 3-D designs. Even though we used our whole Math Workshop today to build, many people still need to revise and rebuild their structures tomorrow. Building takes a lot of time!

You can see that Macy and Dylan have made
revisions to their original rectangular prism design

Ty'onte and Max have decided to build a triangular prism
instead of the rectangular prism they brainstormed

Mallory and Sam are making changes to their cube design

Building Polygons

This week we set out to find the STRONGEST polygon! Which would it be - the triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, or octagon? Many of us had different predictions...some thought the triangle because it was the smallest, others thought the octagon because it had the most sides for support. Check out Max's thinking below...

Max sketched each polygon as he built it
and wrote a few observations 

Kicking Off Book Buddies

This week Ms. Payne's class started meeting with Book Buddies. Buddies chose their books together and couldn't wait to start reading! Book Buddies meet two, sometimes three, times a week to read and think together. Having a conversation about your thinking with a Book Buddy is a huge step in third grade. Check back soon to see some video clips of our conversations!