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Ms. Miedema’s reading group has moved away from guided reading groups and into book clubs (also known as literacy circles)! In these book clubs students are grouped according to interests. Students read and discuss a piece of literature in depth and the discussion is guided by students’ responses to what they have read.  We have a variety of roles the students play during book club meetings:

These roles rotate every time we meet so that every student has the opportunity to experience each position.

During the group discussions students talk about events, characters and their personal experiences related to the story.  As we dive into literature circles we have begun to recognize the importance of asking GREAT questions! And great questions begin with BLOOM. Parents: Ask us about Bloom questions and how they help us during our book clubs!

Here are some pictures of us engaged in our book club discussions:

After our first book club meeting we spent some time at the end of class reflecting as a whole group about what we thought went really well, what could have been better and what we think we should change moving forward to make our discussions the best they can be!

Remember our units on ancient civilizations? We studied ancient Greece, Rome and Mali. Which one was your favorite and why?

The halls outside our classroom help keep our memories fresh:

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:

April:

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

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!!

 As our reading fluency soars so does our reading SOL data 🙂 Our goal is to have everyone in the class in the yellow, green and blue by the end of the year. We’re on track to a perfect score- keep up the hard work and don’t forget to read a good book tonight!!

Heavy rains and flooding are soaking the DC metro region, but we are warm and cozy in Room 40 during indoor recess. We’ve started the movie Frozen, and we LOVE it. As soon as Elsa began the song “Let it Go” the entire class burst into song with her. For the sing along student in your home:

And because Ms. Miedema can’t resist a good vocabulary lesson, here are some words to look up:

Isolation

Conceal

Fractal

Region (This is one of our vocabulary words in 3rd grade, do you remember what it means?)

Share your definitions in the comments section 🙂

See you tomorrow, don’t forget your raincoat!

Room 40 wrote and published a real book!! They just arrived:

Congratulations to our newly published authors!!

Parents, there is still time to order a copy for your student- check your child’s homework folder for this flyer:

It’s throwback Thursday again! Remember when we learned about synonyms and antonyms? Synonyms are words with the same or very similar meaning and antonyms are words with the opposite meaning.  Here is a link to a blog post from way back then:

Remember when we created our synonym peacock….

…and learned our synonym song?

Here’s our performance of the synonym song:

After synonyms we learned about antonyms, words with opposite meanings. We created antonym feet (left and right) and they are still walking all over our ceiling!!

We learned another song to help us remember the definition of antonyms:

  Watch our antonym song performance below:

It’s time for the Throwback Thursday student challenge!! Students, in the comment box try to come up with as many cool synonyms and antonyms as you can!!

We ended our unit on ancient Rome with a lesson about their government. We reviewed a few terms we were introduced to during our ancient Greece unit like democracy, direct democracy and representative democracy.

We put our knowledge of these terms to use during our activity.  We converted the classroom into a representative democracy! 

Every table (district) nominated one student to run in our election, then districts were given ten minutes to help their nominee draft a speech answering the question “Why am I the best person to represent our class?”

In America we have a representative democracy as well.  We are represented by these people:

Before the speeches were delivered we prepared ourselves as listeners.  Voters have a very important job, we hold the power to elect the best candidate to represent us but in order to do so we must be well informed. Power to the people!

Listen to our persuasive speeches:

After we all voted and elected our classroom representative, she got to vote on a variety of topics that are meaningful to us.  We all had an opinion, but only one of us, our representative, had the power to vote for us!!  

To summarize our representative democracy experience we recapped with the following questions:

Parents: See if we can answer these questions for you at home!

Our word of the week is tradition: something people have done for a long time.

We had a great time today sharing our own family traditions. A tradition in Ms. Miedema’s family is to work on a puzzle together over winter break every year.

Some of our sentences are featured outside our classroom:

Here are some additional family traditions from the students of Room 40:

“My family has a tradition of opening our presents on Christmas day.”

“My family has a tradition of every New Year Eve my family and I drink apple cider.”

“My family has a tradition of working every day and I have a tradition of playing every day.”

“My family has a tradition of watching movies every day.”

“My family tradition is every Christmas night we put on a dance.

“My family has a tradition of celebrating births”

 Today we had a surprise visit from a Mystery Reader!  Our mystery reader is an expert on drawing conclusions which worked out perfectly since today was the first day of our new unit: drawing conclusions from non fiction texts! Our mystery reader today didn’t have to travel far to get to our room- she came from 5th grade and is a proud sibling  of one of our students!  She started reading a new book on Greece and led a discussion on how to draw conclusions from the passage while Ms. Miedema modeled how to fill in our new graphic organizer.

We are continuing to use cooperative learning structure during our school day.  Here we are after “stand up-hand up-pair up” sticky high fiving our new partners.  We shared a great discussion drawing conclusions about the construction of the Parthenon.