Time is flying, we’re already done with our fourth week of school!!

Here is the final version of our writing process anchor chart that we created to help us learn the 5 stages (with playdough!). We also made “crowns” to wear when we’re writing to display which stage we are on. We will get started with our very own personal narrative next week. 

Here we are hard at work creating our writing process “crowns”.  We each got a sentence strip divided into 5 sections.  Once we had the stages written down in the correct order we decorated them with images to remind us what happens during each phase.

 

We’ve added a few more things to our classroom this week including the Library Book Bin (below).  We have started checking out books from the library on Thursdays.  We are allowed to check out one book and we have a whole week to read it! We return our books to the book bin on Thursday morning so that when we get to the library during specials time our books have already been checked in and we’re all set to pick out another book.

We applied for jobs during the second week of school and Ms. Miedema has slowly been introducing us to our new duties. Some of the jobs we have are, librarians, agenda assistants, gardeners, pencil managers, computer technicians, filers, math assistants, material managers and classroom organizer. 

Here is one of our pencil managers in action Friday after school 🙂

We’ve also been using our clarity board more and more.  We use this board to help guide our learning throughout the day.  Our academic objective and language objectives describe exactly what we are learning, the itinerary lets us know how we will learn the information and the assessment and transfer task sections tell us how we will show our learning. This board gets updated daily!

We read Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco this week while we worked on making predictions (our anchor chart is below). Some students requested the recipe in the back of the book – here it is! Let me know if anyone tries it- I hope it’s tasty 🙂

It was a great week overall!  We had two students memorize the extra credit poem and present it to the class.  Ms. Miedema video taped the experience and will post it on the blog just as soon as she figures out how to 🙂

I look forward to seeing everyone Monday night for Back to School Night at 6:00.  There will be a lot of important information distributed to parents- see you there!! 

In writing today we learned the stages of the writing process (pre-write, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing) using play-doh!!

We’ll finish up the lesson tomorrow and show you the T-Chart we made comparing what we did with the play-doh to what we will do during the writing process.

For this lesson we all got a ball of homemade play-doh.  Ms. Miedema found this recipe online and it turned out pretty well! If you want to make more at home, the recipe is below.

Homemade Playdough Recipe

What you need:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup water
• 1/4 cup salt
• 2 tsp cream of tartar
• 1 tsp vegetable oil
• food coloring – I used the Wilton 4 pack of colors (red, blue, green, and yellow)

To make:

Add the water and salt to a saucepan and warm over high heat.  Once warm (not boiling) add the flour, cream of tartar, and vegetable oil.  Stir continuously.

The process from start to finish moves fairly quickly.  You will begin to notice the mixture becoming lumpy and thick, then it will begin to move away from the sides of the saucepan and will look rubbery as you continue to stir.

Turn down the heat to a simmer.  I find that just because it’s rubbery on the outside, does not mean it isn’t still a little sticky on the inside.  Flatten it a little into the base of the saucepan using 2 large spoons, pull it apart a little and flip it over.  Do this a few times to ensure that it is cooked properly in the center.

Turn out of the saucepan onto a cutting board and set aside to cool.

Once cool, separate the playdough into equal piles for coloring.

 

We wont get to our poetry unit for a few months but we’re getting a jump start with it in Social Studies! Your challenge this week is to memorize this poem by FRIDAY!! We’ll do a lot of practicing at school but you may need to practice on your own too!

The Importance of Government in Our Community

A community is a place where people live, work, and play. Cora Kelly, Alexandria is where we spend our school day!
There are rules and laws that keep us safe and maintain order,
Without them there’d be a lot of disorder!!

Who makes these laws, wouldn’t you like to know?!
The government of course, they run the show.
Their purpose is to decide if laws have been broken,
They carry out laws, and once they’ve spoken
They reach a conclusion, and that’s what I know!!

By: Ms. Miedema

 

Our DATA is in!!

During the first 3 weeks of school we spent a lot of time “showing what we know”.  We took many, many tests but now we know exactly what we’re going to focus on this year in school!

Check out of wall of “Essential Learning” below.  This wall displays “I can….” statements of everything we need to learn in 3rd grade.  There is so much we need to know!!!

Here is a picture of our blank data chart.  We colored it in on Friday with the data from our tests and had a discussion about how we want to see the colors change as the year progresses.  Right now we have a lot of students in the yellow and red (and that’s OK because we haven’t learned everything yet!).  By the end of the year we want to see mostly blues, greens and yellows!

We developed our strategic goal as a class: “100% of our learning community will meet or exceed 3rd grade reading standards as measured by the 3rd grade reading SOL test in June 2014!” This goal is posted at the front of our room so we can use it to refocus our attention on learning when we start to wander.

If you want to see some proof of our commitment to learning you can find it our Independent Reading Stamina graph that we’ve been keeping since the first week of school.  Look at how far we’ve come already! We are up to a solid 20 minutes of silent independent reading. While we’re reading, Ms. Miedema works with students independently.

We have officially started units in all of our subject areas.  In Social Studies we’re learning about government, rules, and laws.  We played detective on Thursday and Friday and discovered the purpose of rules and laws as well as the basic purposes of government!

We can tell you that we have rules and laws to keep people safe and maintain order.

We can tell you that the purpose of our government is to make laws, carry out laws, and decide if laws have been broken.

Ms. Miedema played the role of a cop and pulled over a student who was “speeding”.  He was going 20 miles over the speed limit!! During this skit, we watched Ms. Miedema (as a police officer) refer to a law made by the government (the 45 mph speed limit), determine that a law had been broken (by the student speeding at 65 mph) and carry out the law (by giving the student a speeding ticket).

In Writing, we are starting our unit on personal narratives!  We read a few personal narratives this week including one written by Ms. Miedema! We are excited to get started working on our own.

We determined that if a persons whole life is like a whole watermelon, then a personal narrative is only one seed from that watermelon.  We’ve brainstormed a few good “small seed moments” that we could write about and after studying some mentor texts (published personal narratives), we created an anchor chart of what goes into a personal narrative. We’ll dig deeper into this next week.

We celebrated our first birthday this year last week! Our birthday boy stood in front of the white board and we all came up with wonderful adjectives to describe him and wrote those words around him.

We have an exciting week coming up.

See you Monday!

During our Language Arts lesson on making connections, we watched a really great video in class today about strategies we can use when we read! We got really into it and know the chorus really well now!

The link is below in case any students want to re watch it tonight at home:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBdCSkB7vlw

We’ve done some important things in the last three days. On Monday we began practicing silent independent reading (we’re trying to build our stamina, our goal is 15 minutes)! Check out our graph below-

On Tuesday, we discussed and created our classroom Mission Statement. We can tell you exactly why we come to school every day and how we plan to be successful this year. We’ve posted it right above our smart board so we can continuously refer to it.

Today, we learned a lot of new words and phrases particularly, effective effort, feedback, resourcefulness, perseverance, and focus. When we come to school tomorrow these words will be up on our classroom word wall- ready for us to use in every day conversation and writing.

To end our day, we discussed how we will celebrate our successes in third grade!  We use an online point system called, Classroom DOJO and we can earn points by following our classroom norms and the Cora Kelly Way (we are safe, responsible, respectful, and we do our best).  We accumulate points by table (team) but can earn points individually, as a team, or as a class. Some teams have already passed 30 points!! Throughout the year we will celebrate as a whole class or by teams.  We’re all really looking forward to reaching 100 points! Below is an image of our celebration brainstorm- we had a lot of great ideas about how to celebrate! The final, revised, list was posted tonight after everyone went home!!   We’ll get to check it out tomorrow morning 🙂

 

We had a busy and successful first week of school! Below are a few of the highlights.

On the first day of school we spent our writing block thinking, discussing, and writing about our hopes and dreams for third grade.

We spent a lot of time this work learning and reinforcing classroom procedures.  This included making a lot of  “Sounds Like and Looks Like” anchor charts so we know exactly what is expected. Below are two examples of this:

We talked about strong emotions we might have throughout the school year and how to cope with these feelings by using our “Cool Off Tree”.  After reading, When Sophie Gets Really, Really Angry, we brainstormed all the strong emotions we could think of and wrote them down on “pieces of bark” and stuck them to the tree.  The next day, after reading Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, we came up with many different ways we can handle our strong emotions. We wrote these ideas down on leave and stuck them to our tree.

We have a hand signal we use in class when we feel like we need to take a break by the Cool Off Tree. After we’ve calmed down, we fill out this reflection form.

On Tuesday we took our very first concensogram on how we feel about reading as a class.  You can see the results below (not bad!!):

After we were introduced to our classroom library we used the “I-P-I-C-K” method to choose our very first book! We’ll get to check out more books in the coming week.  Eventually, we’ll be able to check out 2 books on our reading level and 1 book just for fun.

Friday was our best day this whole week! We practiced working independently and we browsed all the different book genres in our classroom library.

Our schedule was a little different for the first week of school but below is the schedule that we will follow for the rest of the year (starting tomorrow):

I’m looking forward to another exciting week in third grade!

Feel free to e-mail or call me with any questions or concerns you might have, and please make sure you send in your school forms (emergency care information, lunch forms, student permission form, and media release forms) as soon as possible.