Amazing Area Mathematicians!

Welcome to a snippet in the learning life of third grade!  

     Mathematicians in Mr. Flank's class have been working on learning how to calculate area. As an extension to the learning the children created their own, "tiny homes" with a few parameters. The home must be more than 100 and less than 400 square feet. Students then were encouraged to add flooring and take steps to fashion a space worthy enough in which to live. What made this project exciting for many students was that they could use technology to enhance the presentation.  Enjoy! 

Example 1


Example 2


Example 3


Example 4


Each day your children taught and collaborated about their learning. We have been using Google classroom to enhance learning opportunities for our children.  Community and small group discussions have helped foster critical thinking and listening skills, as well as to help each child hold one another accountable for his/her learning. We have become a growth mindset classroom and understand learning takes time and that it is a process. Teaching is for all and learning is for all. Take a look.

Dart Frog Text Feature Challenge

We will create a non-fiction section over dart frogs.  
So that we can provide meaningful information to our readers.
I’ll know I have it when I can design appropriate text features for my part of the class book and justify how they enhance the meaning of the text.  

As readers and writers this week we worked on designing and publishing a non-Fiction class book about Dart Frogs. We were challenged to work together as a design team to create a section of our class book. Not only did we learn about how text features and text structures influence our reader's comprehension we learned a lot about working together as team to submit our section of the book that meets the publising expectations by a deadline. We have shared our work on Twitter and have received some great feedback. We have loved seeing how our work is being celebrated and shared. Our book will also be printed off and added to Beck Elementary's Class Book section in the library.

We are excited to share our published book with you and we hope you learn as much as we did about Dart Frogs.

Showcasing our ePortfolios

This week, Mrs. Sanders, our Instructional Technologist, visited to assist 3^rd graders in setting up their ePortfolios. An ePortfolio offers an authentic way for students to showcase their learning and growth throughout their academic career in Northwest, from 3rd grade all the way to 12th! In the future, their ePortfolio is potentially a resource they can use when applying for college or a job. Students are able to personalize their site as well as include exemplar work they have created here at school. It is a great place for students to share personal and academic achievements and involvements such as; awards, UIL, clubs, choir, etc. See what a few of our students have begun working on!

Noah's ePortfolio
Shashwat's ePortfolio
Sarah's ePortfolio
Ben's ePortfolio

Text Structure

Did you know that an information text can be structured in five different ways? Students have been learning that they can actually determine the way a text is structured to help them better understand information of that text. The five categories are: cause & effect, compare & contrast, sequence, problem & solution, and description.

Students were taught the five types of structures and given short paragraphs to sort based on the evidence from the text. They were to organize them into their correct structure and prove how they knew it was that particular structure. Throughout the process they discovered that most texts have some of the structures present however there is always one overall structure that the author chooses to present information to the reader.  

 Students collaborate with one another to figure out what structure is found in their paragraph. They used their signal questions from the chart to check their finding's.

 This group had great discussions and deeply challenged each others thoughts about the structures it could be.

 Final grouping of paragraphs! They had such a blast with this lesson! 

Now that students have a better understanding of text structure they will be moving into creating a class non-fiction book about poisonous dart frogs. They will have to take information given and think about the text structure of that information and create text features to be published for an audience. It will be a challenging task but we are excited to see what they come up with!! Stay tuned!

A Healthy Start to 2017

Healthy Snacks

Students at Beck have been encouraged to participate in the 21-Day Challenge. This is where students make their own fruit and veggie snack creations. The students were given two different resources to use in order to make their snacks. They were provided with a recipe book and a website to help them find healthy snacks to create. 

Here is the link to the website:

http://kids-teaching-kids.com/

Sophia Shull from Mrs.Stovall's homeroom is sharing about the snack she made.

Sophia Shull

Colbie Moses made a delicious smoothie.

Jump Rope For Heart

This week our kids have started fundraising for Jump Rope For Heart. The program is intended to educate the kids about a heart healthy lifestyle. The funds raised are given to the American Heart Association. The event will take place for Third Graders on February 8th and 9th during their PE time. Please feel free to come and support the kids!

We Have Chromebooks, Now What?

It's no new news that Elementary students across the district were granted with an impeccable piece of technology this year, Dell Chromebooks!  Now the question is, what are these young learners utilizing this tool for?  What possibilities do Chromebook open for our classrooms?

Use of Email

Every student in Northwest ISD is given an email address, @student.nisdtx.org.  Not only does this allow students to be exposed to the email process, but this allows a different type of communication with students and teachers. Teachers may email their students assignments, feedback, concerns, you name it.  Since our district is powered with Google, students may access their email from any device.

Google Classroom

Northwest ISD also purchased Google Classroom, a blended learning platform for schools that aims to simplify creating, distributing and grading assignments in a paperless way. Students may not only post their assignments or comments, but easily give feedback to others. We are so excited about what this source!

See how Kaylan feels about using Google Classroom.

Google Drive

Google Drive has become a popular tool for users to store files, similar to a "cloud".  Students are able to access their files anywhere they are able to login to their google account. Not only are students able to access their files, but easily share with others.

See Dillon share how we have been using Google Drive in our classroom.

Google Apps

Google not only offers Drive, but Slides, Docs, Forms, and much more.  Students no longer need to rely on Microsoft Office or Word, then save to their computer, then upload!  The use of Google Apps puts students' work right in their Drive, so they may access it when needed.  All Apps save live, so students do not need to worry about lost work or changes to their product.

This week, students have merely scratched the surface of the possibilities Chromebooks bring for students in the classroom. We are so excited to see how teachers and students, can learn more ways to utilize our amazing new learning tool, Chromebooks!

Weather Here, Weather There

Our next SBBB project in math and science is focused on weather and comparing trends in 2 different cities across the United States. We began this week by discussing important weather tools that tell us information about our weather. Below is a picture of our anchor chart displaying these tools.

Students then were able to investigate our local weather using a simple weather station. Some classes put these stations together for us for all classes to use. Students were then able to measure air temperature, wind speed, wind direction and amount of rain fall.

Over the next 6 days, students will be collecting data about the weather in 2 different cities. Students were allowed to choose 2 cities, of their choice, and were given charts to record their data. They will be collecting the following information about each of their cities, high and low temperature, wind direction, and chance of precipitation. After 6 days, students will then create a presentation in which they will graph their data to find trends, compare the weather in their 2 cities, and finally write a reflection about what they observed. Exemplar projects will be chosen and displayed on our next standards based bulletin board on January 27th.