In Reading we have finished up our unit on formulating questions, check our data chart below. This was a challenging unit but with a lot of hard word and dedication we managed to reach our goal of getting 100% of students in Ms. Miedema’s reading group to score a 80%-100% on our post assessment!

 

We now understand how to find answers to questions about a passage and we know how to create (or formulate) our own questions about the passage we read. Expect a few pieces of extra credit focusing on formulating questions to come home over the Thanksgiving and Winter break!

We will start our unit on Main idea and supporting detail after the Thanksgiving break.  Here are the results of our pre assessment:

 

From our data we can tell we have a lot of students who are already very strong at locating the main idea and supporting detail! This is going to be a fun unit to cover!

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of last week were half days because of parent teacher conferences.  Our schedules were switched around to accommodate the STEM day schedules so we had reading in the morning from 8:00-9:00.  During this time we worked our way through the book, Dear Deer: A Book of Homophones. 

As a class we discussed the meaning of the word homophone: homo (same) phone (sound) and did a word search as we read the book. Here are some of the words we found in the book as well as a few we came up with on our own:

We followed this up by creating our own sentences with homophones.  We have some really creative students in Room 40! Here are a few favorites:

“Hey! Want to meet me in the hay?”

“I see some fish down in the sea”

“The main idea was all about a lion whose mane covered his whole face!”

“He threw a ball through the wall!”

“I would like to chop some wood over the holiday”

We have finished our personal narrative writing unit!

We shared our stories with each other and we are now enjoying our published pieces of work. We each have a copy of our classroom book, Cougar Class Personal Narratives written and illustrated by the students in Room 40 .  We got to take these books home with us last week- ask us to read you our story! A more formal version of our classroom book will be placed in the Cora Kelly Library for all to read and yet another copy will be placed in our very own Room 40 library. Congratulations to all our newly published authors!!

Here we are sharing our stories with one another from the classroom Author’s Chair:

Here we are enjoying our new books  during independent reading time:

Congratulations to our Student of the Month!!

We are all so proud of our student of the month from Room 40!!

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus (to the tune of Oh My Darling Clementine)
Oh Columbus, Oh Columbus
Landed in San Salvador
He thought he’d found a western sea route to Asia’s Door!

Oh Columbus, Oh Columbus
Sailed for the Country Spain
Discovering the New World
Was a blessing, not a pain.

Juan Ponce de Leon

Ponce de Leon (to the tune of Row Row Row Your Boat)
Ponce, Ponce, Ponce, de Leon
Landed in Florida.
Wanted to find riches and land
For Spain and for his ma.

Jacques Cartier

Jacques Cartier (to the tune of Frere et Jacques)
Cartier, Cartier came from France
Came from France
Explored St. Lawrence river
Wanted to make colonies
In Canada, in Canada

Christopher Newport

Christopher Newport (to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star)
Newport, Newport landed in Jamestown
Made four more voyages to where he had found
Went to the fall line of the James River
Sailed from England for riches to discover
Newport, Newport wanted to find
A way to Asia in shortened time

What a Day!

We squeezed in a lot of learning during our visit to the Winkler Botanical Preserve in Alexandria, Virginia.

Ask us about our fantastic visit and test us on our new vocabulary words:

Predator, Prey, Omnivore, Herbivore, Carnivore, Producer, Decomposer

Today was our 3rd class with ReSET, a science based program run by volunteers from the US Patent & Trademark Office’s Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE).  We had another fun filled lesson, today we learned all about building bridges and we even got to practice building a few of our own.  We tested the strength of our bridges by piling text books on top!

Our reading challenge is going strong.  A lot of students from Room 40 came in with book reviews to share after the long 4-day weekend. Some of these reviews are posted on our blog click here to read some!

Our goal is to read 40 books each, 920 books as a whole class. For each book we read (or every 100 pages) we get to add a sticker to this chart to track our progress:

Please encourage your student to read at home!!

Homework club has started!!

At the beginning of each month our pictures go on this board by the front door to our classroom.  If we turn in our completed homework packet every Friday our pictures gets to stay on the board! If we don’t, our picture comes off the board 🙁

If we turn in our homework every single Friday for a whole month we get to celebrate with Ms. Miedema during lunch on the 1st Monday of the next month.

Make sure you’re staying on top of your homework!

Read every night for 20 minutes and write 2 sentences about what you read in your homework packet.

Third graders at Cora Kelly have finished up our reading unit on identifying the author’s purpose!  We had a lot of fun with this unit and did an excellent job.  Ms. Miedema’s reading group data is below.

Look at how much we improved between the pre-test (shown in green, yellow and red) and the post-test (shown in blue and green).  We celebrated our achievement with a PJ party.

We have now moved on to our Formulating Questions unit.  We’ve talked a lot about how good readers ask questions as they read to monitor our thinking. Here is our pre-test data:

There is a lot to learn in this unit but we’re well underway!! We’re hoping for another big celebration 🙂

Here is the scale we use to create our graphs:

Our goal is to have every student read Independent or Mastery (Green or Blue) by the end of a unit.

59% – Reteaching 60-79% Coaching 80-89% Independent 90% + Mastery