Authors' Tea

The time has come! Students are finishing up their biographies and are ready to share them with family and friends. Students worked hard this first trimester interviewing special people in their lives. They wrote letters to their biography subjects asking questions the class had brainstormed together. With the answers they found, students organized the information they found into five categories: personal, family/friends, school, work, and favorites. After organizing the first answers, students went back for more. They asked clarifying questions, and questions about two specific things that really interested them about their interview subject. When they received their second letter the third graders organized that information and then began writing. Each biography is made up of seven chapters, one for each of the five categories and one for each of the specific things they found most interesting about their subject. Students worked hard to write these biographies, going through many edit and revision sessions with peers and teachers. They then typed up their work as a final draft. When the copies were printed students illustrated them. Now that the biographies are being put together, our class is excited to share our work with the people that matter most. We are inviting our friends and family to come and celebrate our biographies with us on Friday afternoon. We hope to see you there!

Honor Roll Students, First Trimester

Congratulations to our first trimester Honor Roll students:


Maha A.
Safa A.
Kaitlyn D.
Emily M.
Madysen D.
Noah M.
Ana S.
Kaelynn G.
Amira S. 


Keep up the good work!! 

Discovering Big Books

Recently students have started picking up the nonfiction big books during silent reading. Interestingly enough, our classroom now operates at a much noisier level during reading workshop time when this happens. These books promote a sense of community among young readers that small chapter books like Junie B. Jones and the Magic Tree House series do not. There have been up to five students circled around one big book at a time pointing out various things in the books. They like to use the pointing finger wand when they do this to show each other new findings or favorite pictures.Favorite books often include maps, especially of other continents such as Africa. Because the books have been such a big hit these past few weeks, we will hopefully be spending a lot more time reading them in the future. I'm also considering opening up a DonorsChoose project fundraising for big books and other nonfiction picture books about the human body. Based on student interest, that is going to be our next big unit of study after the Authors' Tea for our biography writing.