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!