October!

New month, new seats!  We did change seats on Monday.  We will change seats at the end of every month. 

It was nice to meet so many of you at our Parent Information Night.  I hope you had a chance to look around and see where your child is during the day so when they say we were sitting on the couch or working in the reading area, you can picture that. 

What's new in Room 102?  As usual, a lot! 

MATH: 

We finished our first math unit or topic, which was the introduction to multiplication. Now we are moving on to learning our facts. Students will be learning the facts in a non-sequential order. Today we started with 2 and 5 tables. We move on from there to 9 and then to 0 and 1. The idea of doing facts in this non-standard order is that they learn to use strategies and known facts to help them solve problems with larger numbers. You can use 2 x 4 and 2 x 5 to solve 2 x 9 because 4 and 5 make 9. These strategies will help them solve larger problems and rely on facts that they do know to help them. 

READING:

We have been doing several mini-lessons in our Readers' Notebooks to help us become better readers. Last week I introduced THE FAB FOUR! They are:

Clara the Careful Clarifier  
Sammy the Super Summarizer
Madame the Powerful Predictor
Quincy the Quizzical Questioner

Each one of the FAB FOUR represents a strategy GOOD READERS use when reading. I have been modeling the use of these strategies in class and then students practice using them on their own. 

Clara reminds us to stop when things don't make sense. We might have to "clarify" a word or a part of the story that is confusing. 

Sammy helps us retell the paragraph, page, or story we read. 

Quincy asks questions while he reads! 

Madame helps us make predictions about what we think might happen. We often make predictions by looking at the cover of a book as well as based on the actions or information we are reading. 

Quincy asks questions! Why did that happen? What role does the setting play in the story?  How did the character change as the story developed?

READ ALOUD:

We finished All About Sam! We LOVED it! We started another of my many FAVORITES, Frindle by Andrew Clements. Nicholas Allen is a fun character. He is the boy with lots of ideas at school. But fifth grade brings one of Nick's greatest ideas yet... a NEW word.  "Who says dog means dog?" his teacher, Mrs. Granger says. "You do, Nicholas."  And now Nick and Mrs Granger are in a battle... or a war of words. Captain Nicholas Allen, he likes the sound of that. Nick might have won a battle, but who will win the war?  


OPEN CIRCLE:     

We have had several beginning of the year SCHOOL WIDE assemblies. Last week and today teachers and staff did skits about expected and unexpected behavior in the cafeteria, the hallways, on the playground, in the bathrooms, and on the bus. Students were reminded of the expectations in all these places. In our classroom, we have done Open Circles as well. Last week, we met and discussed NON-VERBAL SIGNALS. These include our school wide "Give me 5", sshhhhh, quiet coyote, bathroom requests, and "Me too or I agree with that". We compared non-verbal signals we see in sports (touchdown, strike) to ones we use in the classroom. They are known to all of us so we can communicate quietly when needed. Ask your child to share some of the non-verbal signals we use in school. 

WRITING!

Our narrative writing continues. Each writing time starts with a mini-lesson. Recently we have discussed writing BIT by BIT and telling our story slowly and with good detail. Another lesson focused on good leads to the story... we tried leads using action, dialogue, and thinking. Check out these examples...

Action:  I jumped up, pushed back my chair and ran for the door. 

Dialogue: "Mom, is that you?" I hollered down the stairs. 

Thinking: I sure hope Dad isn't going to be mad about this. 


We are starting to wrap up this first unit and will choose a story to fix and fancy up for publication. That is the hard part for most third graders. Going back to look at our work again CAREFULLY is hard and identifying our own errors isn't easy. 

• Do each of your sentences start with a capital letter? 
• Did you tell your story bit by bit?  
• Did you start your story in a way that grabs your reader?

These are the kinds of questions I want third graders to ask themselves as they edit their writing.  Time and practice make the hard work of editing easier. 

3rd to 3rd: 

Thank you for helping out in our donations for the 3rd grade class at South Houston Elementary School. The grade 3 teachers met after school today and packed up ALL the in school donations we had collected. This does not even include ALL the online Amazon donations that were made as well.  All in all, we packed up 19 large boxes of everything from sheets, blankets, backpacks, toothpaste, clothes, shampoo, etc. It was a terrific outpouring of support!  Thank you for your generosity! 

The donations are packed and ready to go! 

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!  

Start of the School Year 2017-2018

We just finished Day 2!  

How am I feeling?  

Mrs. Watson! 

We are off to a great start!  This class has been terrific! 

On Day 1 we took care of supplies and getting the "lay of the land". What time is lunch? Where is the bathroom? Do we have homework? When is snack?  Where's my mailbox? 

We read a book called How I Spent My Summer Vacation. In the story, Wallace Bleff tells about his summer in a very imaginative way!  We wrote about our summer vacation... one REAL fact and one IMAGINATIVE event!  

Wallace was kidnapped by cowboys! 

Today we continued on our learning journey!  Students started the morning with response journals. Check out our Tweet!  We learned new things about our classmates. I shared a few things about myself as well. Ask your child to tell you 2 new facts about Mrs. Watson! 

Thursdays are busy with 2 specials!  We enjoyed Spanish with Senora Marinelli!  We also went to the library and had a chance to check out some new books!  

We started Day One of our Reading Workshop today.  We added the first two things to our "Reading is Thinking" chart. 

1. Reading time is for reading ONLY! 
2. Reading time is quiet. 

Tomorrow we will continue with our mini-lessons and independent reading time! 

I read a book today called Charlie's Checklist. Charlie is a young puppy on a farm longing to live in a big city. He makes a list of his criteria or "MUST HAVES" for an owner and he sends it off to the paper. When the applications start rolling in, Charlie learns something about life on the farm. Ask your child about the book!

Charlie longs for big city life! 

This afternoon we played a math game! It was called Knock Out. We played the class versus Mrs. Watson (we each won a round) and then students played with a partner! (See our Tweet!)  After the games ended we talked about number strategies. We also spent some time talking about playing games and winning and losing. As we saw from our class competition, the class won one game and I won one game. It was about LUCK of the roll and not about skill! During the year we will win some and lose some. One of pairs even shook each other's hand at the end!  Great start to our year! 

Talking about SCHOOL...

Remember to ask you child open ended questions about school. 

• "What did your teacher read today?" will get a better answer than "How was your day?"
• What was your special subject today? What did you do/learn?
• Who did you sit with at lunch today?
• I saw you class "Tweet". Tell me about that. 

I hope everyone is enjoying the start to Third Grade!  We have a half day tomorrow!  

Summer Greetings!

April showers bring May flowers! What do Mayflowers bring? (Pilgrims!)

Prior to vacation we really enjoyed Wheelock Reads Week. Our visiting author, Suzy Kline, was amazing. We learned about her "story seed" ideas. Students got their own tiny story seed notebooks so they can write down any story ideas they come across. She uses many things in her own life in her stories. Harry is named after her dad. She gave her fear of heights to Harry and she shared her experience on the Tower of Terror. In her story, she called it the "Drop of Doom"! Even her one -eyed cat was an inspiration for a story. 

We also read at the "beach" that week.  It is so relaxing to listen to ocean waves as you sit reading!  We had 2 Mystery Readers... Mrs. Myers and Ms. Leblanc. So fun!

SCIENCE!  

The scientists in Room 102 have been so BUSY. First off, we had to help Ug and Grock with several problems. We designed a lever, a wheel and axle, a pulley, and an inclined plane!  These are 4 examples of simple machines! 

Students also worked at home to create their own version of a lever... a CATAPULT. Catapults have been around for thousands of years. They were used in feudal times as a way of attacking enemies. The class catapult launching was a HUGE success. All 23 catapults were able to launch a marshmallow. Sienna represented our class just before vacation. Her catapult launched a marshmallow more than 60 feet! A-ma-zing! 

SOCIAL STUDIES

We were lucky to have a visit last week from the Bay Colony Educators. Tim and Carol have been visiting Wheelock School for 25 years talking to third graders about life in colonial times. They dress in period clothing and explain what life was like in Medfield in 1750. It was much different! Work, play, chores, food, clothing, and school... we learned that life in 1750 was not easy. 

Did you know...

• once you lost your first baby tooth, you were considered a grown up?
• if you were left handed, you didn't go to school?
• embarrassment was large part of colonial punishment?
• laws in colonial America were very strict?
• baths were taken only 2 or three times a year? 
• making soap was a job that took all day?
• a man's best feature was his leg?

We are NOW starting to learn about the events that led up to the American Revolution. We learned that a REVOLUTION is when a battle is fought to replace one government with another. The first battles of the revolution were fought right here in Massachusetts! 

Today MAY 4th - we finished CURSIVE WRITING!  All letters have been completed! We will be reviewing and using cursive MORE and MORE. After Math MCAS, we will start taking our spelling tests in cursive! 

READ ALOUDS

This class loves read alouds. They moan and groan each day when I stop reading to head to our specials! We finished A Cricket in Times Square. Several students have picked up other books in the series such as Tucker's Countryside.  We are currently reading Poppy by Avi.  How can you not cheer for this tiny deer mouse?  

Upcoming Dates:

May 8 & 9 th - MCAS (Math) 

May 12th - 1/2 day Professional Development

May 19th - Museum of Science visits Grade 3

May 24th - Family Literacy Night

June 1st - Wheelock Arts Night Agenda

June 14th - Field Day

June 16th - V.I.P. Museum

June 19th - Transition Day

June 20th - 1/2 day... last day of school