Mr. Williams

    The third graders are working on preparing for the first Socratic Seminar of the year.  This activity encourages the students to present their ideas about our reading to each other in a whole-class conversation.  The students take responsibility to run to conversation by taking turns, agreeing and respectfully disagreeing.  They are encouraged to support their ideas with evidence from the texts in class.

    In math the third graders are exploring the distributive property of multiplication.  This property says that multiplying a number by a group of numbers added together will produce the same answer as multiplying that number by each number in the group then adding the answers together.  An example would be 3x6 is the same as (3x2) + (3x4) because the six can be broken down as 6=2+4.  The distributive property can be used as a strategy to find products of larger factors.  An example would be 4x13=(4x10) + (4x3).

    School picture day is Monday, September 25.  Pictures can be ordered online at this link: ordercp.com.  Our Edison school event code is 10012801.  For assistance please contact Color Portraits, Inc. customer service at (847) 382-7505 ext. 7.

I had a few questions from the kids about how to find math problems for homework.  I gave out the math Succeed books on Curriculum Night and showed parents how to find the parent helper pages for each lesson.  That is the book with the homework questions.  To find which lesson and page for each night, you can look on our class website (which is linked at the bottom of all my emails) on the left column.  I'm adding the page numbers and short explanations if we don't have homework that day.  An example would be quiz days.  I am adding this information to the front page of our Google classroom too.  The kids can log into their devices, go to our Google classroom, and look at the top message for the lesson and page number.  They only need to complete one question each night.  Problem #3 in the Succeed book is usually a good one for them to try. 

  We have resources for you!  Access to most of the children's online resources have been collected in a sign in website named Clever.  To access Clever, students should use the Google Chrome web browser using their 5-digit email username (e.g. 71234@elmhurst205.org) and their password (e.g. facat123).  Access to Clever is also on our Google classroom page.  From Clever, the children can use the Google Sign In button with almost every site we use.  Here is a partial list of sites that we use most often at Edison and the best way to access that site:

Freckle - Clever

BrainPop and BrainPop Jr. - Clever (Google Sign in button)

Seesaw - Clever

My ON Reading - Clever

Epic! - Clever (also use 1st 4 digits of email address for password)

Raz Kids - Clever

NewsELA - Clever

Prodigy Play - Clever (Mostly a math game site used as a reward)

PebbleGo and PebbleGoNext - (username: edisonstu, password: edison)

CultureGrams - Google classroom link

Discovery Education - Google classroom link

Encyclopedia Britanica - Google classroom link

Noisli - Google classroom link

Scholastic True Flix & Science Flix - Google classroom links 

BookCreator.com - Google sign in

Kahn Academy - Free site

Math Playground - Free site

Hit the Button - Free site

ST Math - Free site (Great spatial awareness math games)

  I am available for help via email.  I can also comment on Google docs and Seesaw videos submitted by the children.

     “So if I make a mistake I will get smarter?”  Yes!  Our brains learn things better if you make a mistake and then work to fix that mistake.  There have been many recent research findings that are changing the way we should be teaching our children.  There is work done in neuroscience that shows that our brains literally change when we learn something.  Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to continually change during our lifetime as a result of experience.  (Sousa 2017.)  Making new connections in the brain can be done at any age.  Each time we think about and struggle with an idea in our mind, we strengthen the connections with that idea.  If we get it wrong, our brain moves right away to try to correct the error and the connections become even stronger. 

     My job as teacher is to provide the students with as many interesting challenges as possible to get them to think critically, turn ideas over in their minds, take risks, make mistakes, and work hard to improve.  It is wonderful when the students make mistakes.  We celebrate them in third grade because each mistake is a new opportunity to learn.  Our brains benefit from the extra challenges and exercise.

     The research in growth mindsets by Carol Dweck and grit by Angela Duckworth show that successful students are the ones that believe that they can be smarter through these extra challenges and don’t give up when it gets too difficult.  There are rewards to productive struggle in school.  So, we should be rewarding work effort and perseverance, not the end result of a grade or score.  Our jobs then are to work together to provide the third graders an environment where they will be supported in their risk taking and failures and rewarded for working hard and resiliency. 

     Take a few minutes to watch this video with your third grader to help understand why growth mindsets are so important in school.  https://youtu.be/2zrtHt3bBmQ  (Class Dojo:  “Growth Mindset for students Episode 1/5”)