Four Day Week

Four days... but BOY were they BUSY! 

Cursive! We started today! 
So exciting! We started cursive writing in class today with the letter "i". Good thing we read Muggie Maggie so we know we need to slant our letters!  

Isabella works on her cursive! 

CHROMEBOOKS! 
Today we went to the computer lab and Mrs. Fromen, our technology specialist, showed us how to log on to our classroom chromebooks!  Each student was given a user name and password so that they can access a launch pad on my blog to get to learning sites. We will begin to use them in class next week! Yippee! 

Davis is logging into the chromebook today! 

Words Their Way

We have begun a new spelling/phonics program called Words Their Way.  Each week students will be given a list of words following a pattern to "study".  We are not testing students on these words in a traditional spelling test way. Instead we are, in fact, taking time to study the pattern and focus on phonics and vocabulary with our list of words. We will do unit assessments as the year progresses. Students will be placed in an instructional group based upon their current spelling needs.  I will share more about this at Parent Night. 

Peter S. writes his words in alphabetical order! 

STEM or STEAM

Each Friday since school has started we have been giving the students a STEM or STEAM challenge. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) or STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) are activities that foster problem solving AND cooperation within a group or partnership. We did our Paper Chain Challenge, Great Marshmallow Challenge, High and Dry Challenge, and today we did a science experiment with Water Drops on a Penny!  Students are enjoying the challenges each week. 

The boys are making predictions and testing them! 

MATH 
Hip, hip ARRAY!  Yes, we are spending time this week working on making and labeling arrays.  When we say that 3 x 1 is the same as 1 x 3, that is NOT entirely true. The product is the same, but the array is different. I explain it like this.  Imagine aliens...

One alien with 3 eyes is VERY different than

 three aliens with 1 eye. 

 The product is the SAME (3) eyes but...
 the picture is very different! 

















Students will continue their work on arrays and repeated addition equations as we continue to delve deeper into multiplication.

This week we also started to move toward a MATH WORKSHOP format in class. We are doing different activities and then transitioning to another. Today we did array cards, playing a game with a partner and doing a math SCOOT (which involved moving around the room solving problems). We did a FAIRLY good job with the transitions. Next week we will work our way up to 4 different activities!  

Math game... find the SUM and multiply by 2!

WOW WALL!
Did you hear about Mrs. Watson's WOW WALL?  I started it this week and there are already a few WOW papers up there!  I put up papers or work that shows excellent effort and understanding! Make sure you are doing your best third grade work. Your paper might be up there next! 

the WOW WALL! 

Reading Workshop
We are doing a great job with using our independent reading time to READ!  This week we also got our Reader's Notebooks! Students will use these notebooks to record the books they are reading in class (similar to the reading log), keep notes on mini-lessons we do in class, and write about their reading! I love the reader's notebooks. This week, we practiced writing our book titles carefully and correctly. Many students are still working on that skill on their nightly reading log. We also did a mini-lesson on what to include when we write about our reading. One lesson was on the difference between writing that shows your THINKING and FLUFF. 

a reader's notebook... 

You can see from the examples we did that there is a BIG difference in the THINKING sentences and the FLUFF sentences. Telling me what page you are on does not require you to THINK about what you are reading. Making a prediction or asking questions about the story or a character shows that you are engaging with and thinking about your book. 

We want to make sure we are writing THINKING sentences!

What's New in Room 102?

It was great to see so many of you yesterday at Medfield Day! It was a fun day and I saw so many current and former students. Did you get a SMARTIE?  

We just finished Week 3 of the school year. We are really off to a great start and we sure have been busy. 

Reading!  We are learning about our classroom library and we have been making some great CHARTS about how to do our best reading and thinking. This week we charted the differences between FICTION and NONFICTION and made lists of books we thought belonged in each category. 

SCHOLASTIC NEWS: We put Scholastic News under non-fiction on our genre chart.  Each week we will read an issue of Scholastic News. The students will read the articles and we will discuss them together. This week we did a reread of our cover story article. We talked about how REREADING helps us with our vocabulary and our fluency. The online version of the magazine has videos we can watch to gain even more knowledge about the topics. We will discuss non-fiction text features such as maps, vocabulary word boxes, captions, bold print as we read the articles each week. This CLASS SHARED reading experience gives us a chance to talk and discuss something we are ALL reading. 

Yes, we all were intrigued by this fad! 

Students have also been introduced to their BROWSING BOXES where they store books they are reading.  During independent reading, students are encouraged to choose "Just Right" books for reading. We do our best reading and thinking when we read books that interest us and are at the right level for us to read. 

Journals: Twice a week for morning work, we respond in our Response Journals. I ask questions or students share their thoughts on different subjects. Journals are a place to write with our "BEST GUESS" spelling. I don't correct journals. We use them to learn more about each other and work on building our writing stamina. 

Students wrote about where they fell in their family order.  

Read Alouds:  I am a HUGE proponent of class read alouds. I read aloud EVERY DAY. We finished our first chapter book Muggie Maggie by Beverly Cleary  It is the story of a third grade girl who REFUSES to learn to write in cursive!  Our class can't believe someone wouldn't want to learn cursive. 

We have now reached the middle of our second book All About Sam by Lois Lowry.  The class LOVES this book. It is very funny. We see Sam as a baby, then a toddler, and then a young boy in our story. Sam gets himself into some interesting situations when he doesn't truly understand the meaning of certain words. Ask your child about Frank, Anastasia's fish. 

MULTIPLICATION! Yes, we are learning about multiplication. Students have been doing many activities which ask them to look at "GROUPS OF" items. One game we played was Circles and Stars.  We roll a die to see the number of circles to draw and then roll again to see how many stars to draw inside each circle. Then we write BOTH a repeated addition sentence and a multiplication sentence to solve.

Multiplication is "groups of" things. 

We practiced that again when we did an activity called 
Sea Creature Multiplication. 

PICTURING MULTIPLICATION: We also looked at things in our classroom, drew pictures and wrote a QUESTION about what we were trying to solve. When I have 5 sets of paints, what can I use multiplication to solve?  "HOW MANY PAINTS ARE THERE IN ALL?"

Hadleigh draws sets of paints! 

WRITING! Our writing workshop is off to good start. Students are using their topic ideas to work on narrative stories. We put our writing binders together one afternoon. It includes resources such a Quick Word dictionary, our Topic Lists, and any papers from mini-lessons in class. We start the writing workshop with a mini-lesson each day. Students are learning that writing is hard work. We have to take our time and really THINK about how to tell our story with interesting details. One lesson we did this week was called "Reporter versus Storyteller". 

A reporter would say:  I fell off my bike and cut my knee. 

A storyteller would say:  Suddenly I was hurling over my handlebars. I landed with a thump.  "Owwww," I cried. When I looked down, I saw blood oozing out of my knee. 

See the difference?  Which one is more interesting to read?  

We practiced several sentences together. Here is one we did together. 

Students are encouraged to SHOW what happened and not TELL what happened!  

What else?  Well, we have been doing word sorts, playing PICO FERMI BAGEL, going to our specials, filling out our planners, working on walking QUIETLY in the hallway, and we even had a FIRE DRILL! 

Be sure to check out out Tweets each day!