Today is our 50th post - hopefully we haven't lost ya yet!

Math: We had our first lesson on multiplication and division today. As you're probably aware at this point, so much of math nowadays is driven by showing your thinking through strategies and applications. Well, today we practiced using an array as a strategy to solve multiplication problems. As you will see in tonight's homework, an array is a way of organizing the factors in a multiplication problem in rows and columns. This begins the foundation of multiplication fluency - the ability to "see" and compose a number in a variety of ways.

With that in mind, tonight's homework must include arrays for each multiplication problem. I'm at home so I don't have the page number in front of me but it's in chapter 7 if your child doesn't have it in their planner.

Language Arts:

Wildfires - Today we created a web to be used while rereading the text. This web will provide a springboard into our next activity for the book so it's completion is vital to tomorrow's task. In addition to completing their web, they should also reread their book.

Fair Day, U.S.A. - We met in group today to discuss their background knowledge about fairs. After a bit of prompting, our discussion moved from extremely broad (we ate food) to more specific (funnel cake). This is the type of specificity I expect from 3rd graders the first time we discuss a subject. Interestingly, almost all the students described who they went with which I found to be a neat "family" element of fairs... Tonight they are to reread their book and complete their RRJ prompt by describing their personal experiences at the fair using some details form our discussion. This will be used for a comparison/contrast task tomorrow.

Whales - They independently recorded three facts from the book prior to meeting with me. After sharing their facts, we read parts of the book aloud and unintentionally wound up in a prediction discussion regarding the purpose of blubber and what other animals may have blubber for survival...it took some time to connect the polar/arctic aspect but they eventually got it and we looked at a book about Antarctic Seals for comparison purposes. Tonight, they should read the seal book (says level R but it is actually a level L). This is their first complete reading so I suspect they'll need some help with it...