I hope all of you are enjoying the holiday season and the time off from school! Be on the look out for Room 40’s  holiday card- check your mail box!! 

Missing you all, see you on January 2nd! 

Love, Ms. Miedema 

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”

— Benjamin Franklin

In keeping with this famous quote, the students of room 40 have created, drafted and revised a shared piece of persuasive writing to submit to the Classroom Project (a program run by the University of Southern California to raise awareness about the need for additional supplies in the classroom).

During our unit on persuasive writing we learned that we can make our arguments stronger by using convincing adjectives.  We practiced using strong adjectives to help persuade our readers. We are a room of 23 third graders at a Title I school in Alexandria, VA.  Here is our final product, we hope you enjoy it!

Welcome to Room 40!!

TEXT (Word Count : 150)

After eating a delicious breakfast in the fancy cafeteria, 23 popular students greet Ms. Miedema at the door with a firm handshake, a hard high five, or a lovely hug.  Our classroom is crazy, creative, and colorful.  We love it here! Some of us think we can make it even better with supplies such as an iPad, laminator, markers, and book bins. These supplies would help us be smart, successful, and scholarly. They would also make learning more fun, amazing, and entertaining. We deserve these supplies because we are wonderful, hard working, trustworthy, extraordinary, and sophisticated. In conclusion, please support our classroom!

Sincerely, Room 40

Signed with our pen names:

Kisi, JCD, Animal Adventurer, DDO, P.Peace, DJV, B.B. Funny, Stefany, D. Money Boy, Daisy Henks, DM, Lil’ Suzy, Baby Ninja, Eri Awesome, DD, Cocoa, Monster Creepy Guy, Cupcakes Rule, Lil’ Wings, IAV, Tulisha, CS, and Seve King.

View our Room:

After our two unexpected snow days we spent our social studies block learning about the term specialization:

Specialization: Occurs when people focus on the production of selected goods and services.

We watched this short clip, “I, Pencil”  and had a wonderful conversation about the various producers who specialize in producing a certain good or service in order to make those pencils we use every single day!

 

A friend of the classroom from Oklahoma sent new mittens for everyone in the classroom!! Ms. Miedema spent some time over the snow days painting little designs on each set so that we’ll be able to tell all 23 pairs apart! We love them, THANK YOU!! We took some time during indoor recess today to write thank you notes.

We’ve made some real progress on our reading challenge! Look at how far we have come.  Each sticker represents either one book or 100 pages.

OCTOBER:

DECEMBER:

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

We have a student who has already read over 20 books!!

Parents, please continue to support your student by reading with them or having them read independently for at least 20 minutes every night.

We were sorry to miss our P.E. class today but we had an amazing time with our engineer friends from ReSET.  We learned how to make SLIME!! (We even got to take some samples home- Parents beware, please do NOT PUT SLIME DOWN THE DRAIN!! It will clog your pipes.)

We have started out our new social studies unit by reviewing and learning about needs vs. wants, goods vs. services, and producers vs. consumers.

Below are some sample sentence stems we use in our classroom:

The halls outside our classroom are decorated with our hard work!

Have you heard your student tell you what “reading level” he or she is on? Have you ever flipped through the pages of one of their books desperately looking for this mysterious book level?

Here is what you need to know!

At Cora Kelly, each student’s reading ability is measured with a system of reading levels called Fountas and Pinnell.  These books vary in terms of word count, number of different words, number of high frequency words, sentence length, sentence complexity, word repetitions, and illustration support. Below is a grade level equivalence chart recommended by Fountas & Pinnell:

Recommended grade	Fountas and Pinnell level
K	A, B, C
1	C, D, E, F, G, H, I
2	I, J, K, L, M
3	M, N, O, P
4	P, Q, R, S
5	S, T, U, V
6	V, W, X, Y
7	Y,Z
8 and above	Z

 

In third grade, our goal is to have every students reading at a level P or above by the end of the school year.  To help support your student at home with reading and ensure that they are practicing with an appropriately leveled book you can use the Book Wizard tool provided by Scholastic.

1. Click on this link: http://www.scholastic.com/bookwizard/

2. Click on “Search All Books”

3. Click on “Guided Reading A-Z” and then type in the name of your book.

This source has classified many (but not all) books by guided reading level.

The season of indoor recess is upon us! We try to give our students as many opportunities to run around on the playground outside but when the weather doesn’t cooperate we have an excellent back up plan! Some fun, creative things we get to do inside include bracelet and necklace making, peg board mosaics, and letter writing/drawing!

Here are some pictures of indoor recess in Room 40: