In writing today we worked on creating story mountains for our realistic fiction stories.  We learned that authors make their writing exciting and suspenseful with good sequencing. Two students in our class helped us reread Grandfather’s Journey– while we listened to this story for the second time we were focused on the story’s sequence.  We noticed the most exciting, and dramatic event happened in the middle of the story (or the top of the mountain).

After Ms. Miedema modeled how to use this story mountain graphic organizer we got started creating our own! Most of us didn’t get to finish today but we’ll continue to work on this tomorrow.

Congratulations to our student of the month!!!

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

Our new unit in reading is context clues! What are context clues? They are clues that an author puts around a difficult word in a passage to help the reader define the word. We used this video in class today to help us understand context clues and our role as word detectives:

http://www.flocabulary.com/context-clues/

Check out the anchor chart we created to help support our learning:

Ms. Miedema was so excited to start our new unit in social studies today!! We welcomed the new week with a trip back in time to….

…Ancient Greece!!

As always, our classroom library is helping to support our learning. We went crazy for these books, by the end of the day there were hardly any left on the shelf:

Today we started: Ancient Greece THE GAME

Here is how it works:

Papadopoulos Family (Purple Table)

Philipou Family (Blue Table)

Aristotelous Family (Orange Table)

Costas Family (Red Table)

Loucas Family (Yellow Table)

Hallas Family (Green Table)

After learning our family names we discussed crucial information that every new citizen must know:

1.  Every day the city of Athens publishes a newspaper called The Parthenon Post.  This newspapers tells everyone in the city what is going on around them. As new citizens to Athens, it is recommended that you read the paper daily to stay up to date and informed.

2.  As your family or certain family members earn coins, your family ranking goes up.

3.  If your family looses coins, your family ranking goes down.

4.  As in real life, your hard work pays off. The harder your family works, the more coins you will earn.

5.  Also like in real life, natural disasters and other mishaps occur that will set us back and force us to loose coins.

We had lots of opportunities to earn coins for our families today! Our daily activities included the following:

•Locate Greece on a world map

•Define and draw a Peninsula

•What are physical characteristics?

•What are the physical characteristics of Greece?

Here are the maps we used:

Parents: Ask us what a peninsula is- we should know! You can also ask us to define physical characteristics and give you examples from Greece.

Here are some clever tricks we are using to help us remember key vocabulary:

We’re looking forward to day 2 of ancient Greece on Wednesday!!

We enjoyed a visit last week from another mystery reader!! We had four clues to guess who was coming- here they are:

Clue 1: I speak more than one language.

Clue 2: I have a student in Room 40.

Clue 3: I have two sons.

Clue 4: I was born in East Africa

Our guesses were all over the place, but no one guessed correctly– we were all totally surprised!! Our reader read many, many chapters of Hour of the Olympic, we were totally engrossed.  While our mystery reader read to us we were listening for words with prefixes and suffixes to add to our anchor chart.  Here are some highlights:

Thank you so much mystery reader for coming in last week!! We had such a fantastic time reading and learning about the ancient Olympics with you. We’d love to have you back any time!!

Last week we presented our famous American statues that we had been working on for a few class periods. Each table studied and researched a famous American and then created a statue that would depict why their American was famous. The statue presentations also included a plaque describing the statue and the famous American. Here are some pictures from the big event:

The stage was set ….

Thomas Jefferson:

Thomas Jefferson was born in Virginia (our state)! He was the third president of the United States and he wrote the Declaration of Independence, a document that states that people have certain rights.  He was a leader who helped to develop our new country.

The Declaration of Independence is significant (important) because it made us a free country.  (Free from whom? Parents- ask us about it!)

Thurgood Marshall:

Thurgood Marshall was a lawyer who defended people at a time when not all people had equal rights. He was the first African American justice of the United States Supreme Court.

In this picture we have a judge, a lawyer, and two people celebrating equality. Parents- ask us who is who!!

George Washington:

George Washington was the first president of our new nation.  He worked under the new republican form of government.  He helped put the basic principles (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) into practice for the new nation!

This statue depicts George Washington leading his (her!) troops into battle. Parents, ask us who is who in this picture!

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an African American minister who worked for equal rights for all people. He helped bring about changes in laws through peaceful means.

Cesar Chavez:

Cesar Chavez was a Mexican American who worked to improve conditions for farm workers. Parents- ask us who is who in this photograph!

Abraham Lincoln:

PHOTO COMING SOON!!

Abraham Lincoln was the United States president when the country was divided over the issue of equality for all people.  He helped free African American slaves.

This was the end of our famous Americans unit! Today we got to take home our final product.  Ms. Miedema collected and organized all of our presentation notes with copies of all our readings into these little booklets:

Students: enjoy your new books! Share them and discuss the contents with your parents 🙂

We continue to make a lot of progress on our reading challenge! Look at how far we have come.  Each sticker represents either one book or 100 pages.

OCTOBER:

DECEMBER:

JANUARY:

February:

Students in room 40 are working hard to reach our goal of 40 books each by the end of the school year!

We attribute the huge jump between January and February to all of the new, fun and age appropriate books we got using the ACPS Dream Fund Award money. We got some wonderful discounts from Barnes and Nobel and were able to get yet another batch of books:

Parents, please continue to support your student by reading with them or having them read independently for at least 20 minutes every night.  If you need more books- let Ms. Miedema know!!

We‘re celebrating the 101st day of school tomorrow!!

3rd graders are welcome to wear 101 things tomorrow (as long as it will not interfere with academics)!

Here are a few examples:

101 cheerios on a hat

101 beads on a necklace

101 stickers on a shirt

Be creative, I can’t wait to see what you come up with!!

We walked into the classroom this morning and we were greeted by an exciting  scene: Valentines Day in Room 40!!! Ms. Miedema left us some treats on our tables:

 We got to wear these necklaces all day long! Well….as long as we weren’t distracted by them 😉

The festivities really got started during recess. We received valentines gifts from our friend in Oklahoma- she thoughtfully put together a packet for each of us filled with crayons, stickers, a pencil, an eraser and a little note! Thank you so much!!!

 Then we passed out the Valentines cards we created for each other – and made a few more! Here are some highlights:

Ms. Miedema is so excited to teach a unit on ancient Greece in social studies this year.  This is a special unit for Ms. Miedema because she lived in Greece for 6 months and was a history major in college and studied a lot about ancient Greece!

Below is a preview of what we’re going to be learning about as well as a few pictures from Ms. Miedema’s time in Greece:

(SOL 3.4) Greece is located on a peninsula with many islands, mountains, and hills.  It is surrounded by the beautiful Mediterranean sea.

(SOL 3.4/3.7) The people of ancient Greece built ships, fished, made pottery and farmed. (Some of this is still true in Greece today!!)

Ships and ship building:

Fishing:

Pottery:

Farming: There is not a lot of rich (good) soil in Greece.  The soil is dry and rocky.  Certain plants grow great in that type of soil- like olive trees!!

(SOL 3.1) The Olympic games of today are modeled after the games of ancient Greece:

The Olympic torch today is ignited (lit) several months before the opening ceremony of the Olympic games at the site of the ancient Olympics in Olympia,Greece. Eleven women, perform a celebration at the Temple of Hera in which the torch is kindled by the light of the Sun (its rays are concentrated by a parabolic mirror). The flame then travels to the Olympic host country where it burns throughout the entire Olympic games. (source)

Olympia, Greece (Site of the ancient Olympics):

(SOL 3.1) The architects of ancient Greece used columns and arches in the construction of their buildings.  Ancient examples still exist today. A famous example in Greece is the Parthenon.

The Parthenon: A temple in Athens, Greece. The temple is dedicated to the goddess Athena (below).

(SOL 3.1) The government of the United States is based on ideas developed in ancient Greece. Greece is considered to be the birthplace of democracy (government by the people). Ancient Greece was a direct democracy (a government in which people vote to make their own rules and laws).

(Greece’s current Parliament building pictured below.)

I hope you are excited for this unit!! We are going to have a blast 🙂 See you Tuesday!!