Our New Year's Early Party

Happy New Year! What a wonderful New Year’s Early Celebration before vacation. The students had a blast coming to school in their pajamas, singing holiday songs,  playing games, eating pizza in our classroom and watching “The Bee” movie with all of the third graders. It was a perfect day!

Here are some highlights from Our Holiday Sing Along.

 I hope you and your families have a wonderful holiday season filled with joy and celebration. Happy New Year!

Our Holiday Traditions Writing Celebration

Thank you for your support in helping your child with his/her Traditions Writing Piece. We had a wonderful Writing Celebration on the Wednesday before break. We were able to share our published Holiday Traditions with friends from all of the other third grade classes. We gathered in the hallway outside our classrooms to find partners to read with and discuss our family’s holiday tradition. It was a new way to celebrate our accomplishments complete with a candy cane!

The kids were exhausted after all of the celebrating and fell right to sleep!

Grammar and Punctuation Study

Language Fun!

We had lots of fun learning about grammar in December. We covered nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. As a class, we completed packets identifying these different parts of speech, but we also found great examples of these in our independent reading books. We documented all of our word hunts in our Word Study Notebook. 

In addition, we focused on punctuation marks and how these important marks "boss the reader" around. We, as the writer, tell the reader how we want it to be read. The students definitely became more aware of these essential marks during Reading Workshop and are now using them more consistently in their own writing. I am noticing good transfer of these skills into the student's Word Study Notebook sentences each week. At this point in the year, I am expecting well thought out sentences that include strong word choices. For example, I am looking for a variety of nouns, powerful verbs and creative adjectives to make these sentences interesting to read. I am also expecting a high level and diversity of punctuation usage. Language is fun!

Holidays Around the World

For December Social Studies, we traveled around the world studying how other countries celebrate Winter Holidays. We often began by reading a book or watching a short video from that country. We then examined the flag from that country and read a sheet describing the traditions and culture, usually focusing on food. Next, the students recorded information that they learned on the back. We marked the country on the correct continent on our individual maps and also on our "World" Bulletin Board along with the flag and a picture associated with that country. The commonality among all of the Holidays was the special time spent with family and friends.

Seed Harvesting

We made one last observation of our plants and then harvested our own seed pods. Some of the students are enthusiastic to continue this growth process at home!

We played a Jeopardy Game to bring closure to this topic in a fun way by testing our knowledge of seeds, plants and bees and their interdependence.

Here are some of our scientific bee drawings to show the amount of growth that took place during our unit of study. The drawing at the top of the page was completed before we began our bee research and the drawing at the bottom was done at the end of our plants and pollination study. Notice how this is a visual representation of the student's learning.

Your child's science folder went home on Monday. I hope you enjoyed going over these papers with your child. There will be a written test tomorrow along with a special "honeycomb" treat.

Molly's Pilgrim

We recently enjoyed the book Molly’s Pilgrim, by Barbara Cohen, as a whole class shared book experience. Prior to reading, all students recorded their ideas of what a Pilgrim was. I read the text aloud while students followed along. We stopped throughout reading to “turn and talk” to partners about reactions, connections and theories of this book. We also took many “stop and jots”. After reading, we realized that our thinking had changed about what a Pilgrim was. We focused on character traits again and supported our thinking with examples from the text. In addition, we made a story map and discussed the author's "big idea". Please engage your child in a conversation as a follow up to this experience. We filed our Molly's Pilgrim book packets in our Reader's Notebooks. We made clothespin dolls as a culminating activity based on the book. We also delighted in watching Molly's Pilgrim as a movie and compared the movie to the book.

Check out a Turkey Thesaurus!

We used a thesaurus for the first time. Make sure you ask your child what the difference is between a dictionary and a thesaurus. Each student was given a simple, overused word such as "said" and he/she needed to find at least 7 other words with similar meaning. We looked up the word in alphabetical order in the thesaurus or used the computer and recorded our words on an index card. Next, we created a turkey to display our work. We wrote each word on a turkey feather and shared them with our class. This will help us with our writing in the future to choose "WOW" words

!

Writing Update

Writer's Notebooks

Our morning work each Monday is journaling in our Writer’s Notebook about our weekends or important events in our lives. The children choose a topic of significance to them. Some students have written expert lists of topics they know a lot about, poetry or step by step how to articles. Please take some time each weekend to discuss some possible topics for your child to write about so he/she comes ready to write on Monday. This is a great way for me to hear about their lives and interests. The students enjoy sharing these entries with friends and editing each other's work. 

Writing Celebration

The students have worked diligently on publishing their personal narrative writing pieces. We discussed a personal narrative as a “memory” or “snapshot” of an event in our lives. We made webs of our memories in our Writer’s Notebook and shared them with our talk partners. We then chose the one we wanted to write about and made a mind map of our ideas. We looked at the who (characters), when, where (setting) and what (plot) of our stories/experiences and then focused on a powerful beginning and ending. Our class had a wonderful writing celebration this week as a culmination of our hard work. This is a time where our classmates read our writing pieces and we share comments with each other.

Lastly, we made a toast to good writing!