So Much to be Thankful For!

With the snow falling and Thanksgiving on the horizon, I've been feeling extraordinarily blessed and grateful.  This school year has been so incredible so far and I am totally in love with our class.  We have learned so much over these past 11 weeks and have had a ton of fun doing so.  I really feel so honored to spend my days teaching this fantastic group of people!  Thank you so much for all that you do!  I so appreciate you and your support.

This week is action-packed so hold on tight!  Here's what is going down in Melissa's third grade this week:

Spelling: There will be no spelling sorts this week as I am reassessing students to start new groups over break.

Reading Workshop:

We are continuing our focus on non-fiction this week.  We will be learning about nonfiction features and their purposes.  When we encounter a compelling photograph or a map filled with fascinating detail, the power of visuals to enhance learning and understanding comes through loud and clear.  Nonfiction is full of these features which other genres don't have.  These features along with titles, subheadings. framed texts, and fonts help us navigate through informational texts.  This week, students will learn about these features and discuss how the features support their understanding.

We will be using our weekly Scholastic News as well as some nonfiction books on France to support these lessons.

Writing Workshop:

We will be finishing up our "State Study" with Ms. Emily's class this week.  Students will be focusing finishing their visual aid as well as writing a paragraph or two about their particular state.  This will be our introduction into research writing and presenting that will set us up for our country study after break.

Social Studies:

This week students will be introduced to potential research topics for our study of France.  I have about 25 topics to choose from.  I will present the topics to the students with a powerpoint and a brief description.  Students will have a list of the topics and rate them 1-4; 1 = I don't want it 4 = I want it really bad. I will collect the lists and assign the topics accordingly.  Students will know their topic by Wednesday.  I will provide information on each topic, but researching at home and over break is highly recommended.

Math:

Measurement is still the name of the game in math this week.  We will continue exploring and measuring items to the nearest 1/2 inch.  This week we will continue discussing perimeter and area.  We define perimeter as "measure all the lengths and add them together" and area as "the short side measurement times the long side measurement equals the area."

Here's some pictures of our measurement lessons from last week:

 Last, but definitely not least, this week is our last week of Celebrate the Beat. We will be participating in a performance for the parents and community on Thursday November 21st.  Students need to be back at school and to report to our room to get ready for the performance.  The performance starts at 6:00 in the elementary gym.  When we are performing as a whole group, we will be on stage left or lookers right, which ever makes more sense to you.  During our dance with Bobby's class, we'll be in the middle.  It is so important that all students participate.  If you have any issues with timing, rides, or anything that may interfere with your child performing, please let me know as soon as possible.

Thanks again for everything.  Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

Keep on Rockin' in the Third Grade!

I hope you all had a marvelous weekend!

We have another amazing week coming up in third grade.  Here's the breakdown of what we'll be doing this week:

Reading Workshop:

We had a successful week last week with our character trait focus.  Students practiced this comprehension skill as a whole group and independently.

This week we will continue focusing on comprehension, but we will be using non-fiction texts.  Students will still be permitted (and encouraged) to read their fiction chapter books, as the skills transfer to fiction reading as well.  But, for learning the lessons and in-class practice, we will be using nonfiction materials.

We will be learning strategies to help us monitor our comprehension.  When readers monitor their comprehension, they keep track of their thinking while reading.  They listen to the voice in their head that speaks to them as they read.  They notice when the text makes sense and when it doesn't.  Students will learn to "fix up" their comprehension by using a variety of strategies including stopping to refocus thinking, rereading, and reading on.  To become independent, and thoughtful, readers need several strategies to call up when needed.  With practice, these monitoring lessons allow readers independently  figure out what their comprehension problem is and find the strategy to solve it.

WritingWorkshop and Social Studies:

We will continue practicing paragraphing while we finish up our final personal narrative pieces.  Writing Workshop and Social Studies will collide this week as we will be working with Ms. Emily's class on our "Research a State" project.  Students will work in pairs to research a state in a region of their choice.  Students will learn about state symbols, border states, state history, fun facts, landmarks, natural resources and more!  We will be using these amazing state boards for our resource:

These boards are full of information about each state.  Through this project, students will learn about their particular state and also non-fiction features, graphic organizing, synthesizing information and putting it into their own words, and paragraph writing.  This nonfiction paragraph writing will be expanded in our upcoming country study unit after Thanksgiving break.

Math:

In case you haven't heard, we are learning about measurement.  Last week we learned all about the metric system and its three basic units.  Shock of shocks, we learned about it via a song.  I posted a video of this song on our website http://melissasthirdgrade.weebly.com/ under the Metric System tab.

This week we'll be learning about the U.S. customary units of measurement, but I don't have a song for that...yet.

Fluency Poem:

This week's fluency poem is The Fifty Nifty United States by Ray Charles.  We have been working really hard on memorizing the states and have done pretty great so far.  We just really want to firm it up this week and our fluency poem is a fantastic way to to just that!  Here is a link to our favorite youtube version of the song:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb0eOmX7ZGw

That's all for now!  Thanks again for taking the time to read this blog.  I so appreciate you and all that you do!

Celebrate the Beat is Here!

First things first, I want to thank you all for attending parent-teacher conferences last week. We had 100% participation and I truly enjoyed discussing your child and their progress with you.  Thank you!

Also, our Halloween party and post Halloween day both were amazing!  Our students were a bit tired on Friday, but they pushed through and stayed on task.

Here's the weekly academic happenings in Melissa's Third Grade:

We are so excited to start Celebrate the Beat!  We will be practicing every day in the Multipurpose Room from 2:30-3:20.  We've had to tweak our schedule a bit to accommodate CTB, but it is so worth it.  Our core content areas will not be compromised as a result of these changes.  We will not have P.E. during Celebrate the Beat which leaves us with enough time for our academics.  It does cut into our social studies time just a bit, but not to much.  Our parent volunteer times will remain the same despite the alterations.

Also parents, if you want to join in the fun of Celebrate the Beat, there is an opportunity for you!  The CTB team will be teaching a "Parent-Teacher Dance" on Wednesdays after school from 5:30 to 6:30.  I will be participating and it is a ton of fun!  Please let me know if your interested.


Readers Workshop:

Last week our focus was on Character Traits.  We practiced the comprehension strategy of inferring character traits by analyzing the actions and words of our characters in our class read aloud Peter and the Starcatchers.  We talked about how authors give us clues like character's actions or dialogue to show us who these characters are.

Students began to work on this skill independently toward the end of the week and we will continue working on inferring character traits this week as well.  We finish up the week with deciphering between fact and opinions.  This will be a great lesson to tie into our character traits and inferring.

Writers Workshop:

Last week we implemented our discoveries from famous author's writing techniques into our own writing.  We spent a lot of time talking about word choice and how we should replace "worn out" words like "good" and "happy" with words that were more interesting and descriptive.  We learned how to use classroom resources and a thesaurus to find high quality words.  Most students are finished with group revision and will be spending the week making changes, editing and getting ready for their second revision.

Our target skill this week will be paragraphing.  This skill is kind of tough at first, so we need lots of practice.  I begin by showing students two samples of a piece of writing.  One is paragraphed and one is not.  We discuss how the paragraphed piece just looks better and seems easier to read.  Then we try to figure out when the author paragraphed and why.  Then I bust out my trusty anchor chart that tells us exactly what we just discovered!  Coincidence? I think not!

We will spend a lot of time practicing with paragraphing and editing sample pieces before we will be doing this work independently.  

Math:

We will beginning unit 3 in our math curriculum which is one of my favorites:  Measurement!  We will be learning about units of measurement, standard and metric systems, perimeter and area.  This unit is very hands-on and so much fun!  

Social Studies:

Last week we learned a lot about the continents and oceans.  This week, we plan to spend a little time talking about countries.  We will look at world maps and see where our country is in relation to the countries we are trying to help through our World Citizenship charity Heifer International.

Speaking of Heifer International, we have only raised $13 dollars to help.  I know that we can do better than that!  We plan to collect money until after the holidays.

Thanks again for all that you do and for reading this blog.  Please feel free to contact me if needed!