A week full of smarties...

I am seriously beyond proud of my students this week. It is only the second week of school and they are just amazing me. The things that they are able to do and the things that they are catching on to so quickly, I am so proud. It has really made me happy. There are days where I used to be so stressed out (and admittedly Tuesdays continue to be stressful days because of grade level meetings) but my class just reminds me that I am there to teach and clearly I am doing a good job of it! So I wanted to record some of the things that amazed me this week that my students said...

I barely taught expanded form. I touched on it for a few minutes and then let students try it just to see. Most of them got it right away! And as we continued to work with larger numbers they STILL were able to do it!

Addition with regrouping- I have NEVER had a group of third graders that could do it. And without me even teaching it. I use Ashleigh's weekly word problems as morning work and expected to really struggle in August with them since we haven't done adding and subtracting but they are able to do it for the most part. At least half of them can even regroup with subtraction! I am amazed!

Sentences and fragments- they are just rocking it out with these! All levels of students in my room can get this. They all can identify that a fragment is an incomplete sentence and that a sentence has two parts (for now they are calling these a noun and a verb...until next week).

Matter- on Monday they had no clue what matter even was. Thursday we were listing different examples of solids, liquids, and gases. Most years the best my students can come up with for gas is air. This year... I got (without prompting) helium (they did call it the "air that makes the balloon float... so I told them the correct name), the exhaust from a car, and steam when you are cooking. I could NOT believe it! I am beyond proud of this one!

Even during our shortened version of morning meeting... we played caught red handed this week. After the first day of playing they were really good at making sure the person guessing could not find out who had the ball. If you don't know what this game is- all students stand really close in a circle with one child in the middle. The child in the middle closes their eyes while the circle passes a ball around behind their backs. I taught them to try to be sneaky so they weren't caught with the ball. On the second day of playing NONE of the guessers got it right- my kids caught on to how to be patient and not obvious. Now, to get the student in the middle to be patient and figure out where the ball is.... it will happen someday.

I told them they are the smartest class in the whole school.... but made them promise to keep it a secret. Let's hope we can hold onto this theory and prove it in April...