100th Post! Happy Holidays!

On the last day of school before our holiday vacation, our class had music. When I picked them up from Mrs. Tripp's class they sang me the most amazing song called We Will Jingle to the tune of We Will Rock You". My favorite part was when Thierry played the air guitar and slid across the floor towards me. My third graders are rocking and they have so much personality. Enjoy the holidays and we will try to post much more frequently this coming half of the school year!

Happy Holidays! 
See you January 2, 2014
Mrs. Derouche

Catching up on Blogging Part 2: Community Debate

At the end of their community unit, students were asked to write persuasively to me about the community that was best to live in. We had learned about rural, urban, and suburban communities using books, videos, and internet resources. We created t-charts listing the pros and cons to living in each neighborhood in preparation for the task. Afterwards, students debated their point with their peers. They were split into debate groups based on the choices they made in their persuasive letters. Below is a video excerpt:

Catching up on Blogging Part 1 : Communities

This past fall we began a social studies unit about the three types of communities. By the end of the unit students would be expected to define rural, suburban, and urban communities as well as compare and contrast them. 

In order to prepare students for this learning, we began by discussing the communities we are all a part of. Students are a part of home/family, school, Lewiston, Maine, and USA communities as well. While discussing these communities, students completed different writing prompts and drawings.

Daily 5: Word Work

Because today is Friday and we have already had our weekly spelling test, our students spent this afternoon's word work practice time using math and social studies content words. We practiced spelling words like digit, addend, sum, property, parentheses, estimate, rural, urban, suburban, and community. It is just as important for us to practice our content words as the sight spelling words each week. We know that word work not only improves our spelling but our reading and writing skills as well. 

The different word work stations we've been practicing are stamping, magnetic letters, white boards, and playdoh with cookie cutter letters.

Read to Self, Daily 5: Practicing Stamina

Our third graders have been working really hard to build up their reading stamina over the past month of school. We started with a very low stamina of only one minute where the entire class could stay focused on our reading without moving around the room, talking to a friend, or looking away from our book. Since then we have built our stamina up to a solid 30 minutes or so a day and even had one afternoon where we read over 40 minutes! We still have days where we get distracted easily or would rather be doing other things than reading our books independently but we understand that this is part of practicing to become a better reader and we are determined to keep working at it! In the meantime, take a look at some of our dedicated readers at work!

Rounding to the Nearest 10 and/or 100 with "The Dot"

While studying place value in math this year, Mrs. Turgeon, our ed tech helper, and I decided that the children might benefit from making a human timeline. If we were a number moving along the number line, maybe we would be better able to round. This strategy really helped our classmates to see where our number was on a number line in relation to the nearest 10 or 100.

We used white boards to mark our intervals on our human number line. We counted in increments of one if we were rounding to the nearest 10 and increments of ten if we were rounding to the nearest 100. After numbering our white boards the student wearing "the dot" headband had to find their place in line. Based on what classmates saw we told the dot whether or not to round themselves down or up the number line. 

If you would like to continue practicing rounding with your students this year, a rhyme we have used to help us remember which way to round is "5 through 9, up the line; 4 or less, down OH YES!"

Whole Brain Teaching

As we start our school year, I am seeing that I have quite the energetic group of students. They like to talk and move around as much as possible. To better suit the needs of these students, our class has piloted a classroom management system called whole brain or power teaching. This type of teaching involves call and response between teachers and students and gestures to help students internalize learning through muscle memory. My favorite part about power teaching is that teacher talk or lecture is limited to sixty second snippets before students respond or imitate the teacher.
At this point in the school year, students are practicing the five whole brain teaching rules and the basic call and response techniques. As the year progresses we will hopefully be using the whole brain teaching techniques through out the day in all lessons. If you are interested in learning more about power teaching there are many videos online and there is a website that can be accessed as well. Also, please feel free to ask your children what type of techniques we’ve been practicing or about the five classroom rules.
Here are some good videos to start watching if you are interested in learning more:

Whole Brain Teaching: The Basics
Third Grade WBT: The Rules
WBT First Grade

September 2-6 Newsletter

First 3 Days

Well that was in interesting first few days of third grade wasn’t it?! My new third graders are very intrigued by the new ramp downstairs and got to see the new music room location this Friday. They are very curious to see if anything else has changed at Montello as well.
As of Friday we have 24 students in our classroom- 12 girls and 12 boys. Perfect! We are excited to get going but tired and getting used to our new class schedule which is a big change from our summer vacation of course. We have practiced 2 fire drills so far and done an amazing job! We were very quiet and respectful, and the sixth grade teacher in our pod, Ms. Agate even gave our class a compliment!
I have not sent home the class newsletters to those parents who did not make it to the open house yet; there was a lot of other beginning of school year paper work to be filled out and I didn’t want to overwhelm you. I will attach both newsletters here and send them home next week. Everyone have a great long weekend and see you Tuesday!

Library Field Trip

 

This past Monday we went to the Lewiston Public Library for a third grade field trip. All the third grades in the district make a yearly trip to the library to learn about how to find books in the library, how books are organized, and the summer reading program held there. We went with Mrs. Munsey's class this year. We had a scavenger hunt, played library Jeopardy, borrowed books, and were read to by one of the children's librarians. It was a very educational field trip and many of the students left excited about the new books that we had borrowed. Such smart third graders!!!

iPads and Math

Lately our students have been using the iPad a lot more in our day to day learning. Fardowsa is using the iPad to practice math skills on IXL here. We use the IXL website to practice math drills that are grouped by category. Lately we've been working in IXL fractions, geometry, and measurement.

Montello Studies Countries

 

Earlier this year teachers made a plan to study countries all around the world at the end of the school year. Each teacher chose their country in advance and my third graders will be studying Sweden! I am part Swedish and wanted to learn more about the country and am coming to find that has some things in common with Maine which makes it interesting to study with the class. For example the weather is similar, Swedish people eat a lot of potatoes while Maine has a lot of potatoes, and both Maine and Sweden think the moose is a pretty big deal. Other countries in our pod are China, France, and the Native Americans of America!! Keep looking back to find out what other interesting things we learn about the amazing northern European country!!

Writing our Pen Pal

Abdi continues to write to my sister Sammi about the Roald Dahl books she got for us this Christmas. We have read many of them during our read alouds each afternoon. We have covered Matilda, The Twits, The BFG, The Witches, and now George's Marvelous Medicine. In reading groups we have read James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We love Roald Dahl! Abdi just wanted to make sure that Sammi loved reading as much as we did and see if she reads as fast as we do. What a thoughtful third grader!!

Race Track Fractions

We have been practicing fractions in math for a few weeks now. Something we are working on still is adding fractions. One game we have played to practice that now is Race Track Fractions. In order to play this game you need to roll a die twice and make a fraction out of the numbers you roll. The smaller number is the numerator (top) and the larger number is the denominator (bottom). There are five race tracks a student needs to complete in order to win the game. The race tracks are split into half, thirds, fourths, fifths, and sixths. The first student to finish all five tracks is the winner!

Finding the Characteristics of Poetry

 

In writing students are learning about poetry. To start, we read and talked about poetry. Our focus was on the characteristics of poetry. We know that poetry often times rhymes, has repeating lines, discusses a single topic, sometimes looks like a list, sometimes looks like a shape, has imagery (the five senses), and has a certain feeling or emotion. We looked through a variety of our new library books to find these characteristics and when we did find something we added it to an anchor chart of that characteristic trait. At the end of our search, we went over our lists and reviewed our findings.

Mission Day After Party- Celebrating the 3 Bs

What seems like a long, long time ago our class filled our Monty Eagle on the front door. In order to fill the Monty eagle you have to earn Monty feathers. Monty feathers are earned for being safe, respectful, and responsible students. We filled our eagle with 377 feathers back in January but we didn't have our celebration because I was missing some of the equipment needed. Once I found what I needed, I didn't want to upset all our important space learning so I waited until Mission Day came and we celebrated afterwards. Our celebration of our respectfulness, safeness, and responsibility was an X-box Kinect party. We played Kinect Adventures and a dance game. It was so fun and who knew my class had so many amazing dancers?! We had our alien cupcakes and snacks from Sam's mom while we danced and played. It was a good way to end our space unit and celebrate being going Montello citizens. I'm very proud of my third graders. 

 Rukia, Gidhan, and Binti are cheesing it up for the camera with 
their minty alien cupcakes.

Abdi showing off his sweet alien cupcake!

Brady and Xavier are doing their best to beat this 
Kinect Adventures game! 

 When it wasn't their turn, students waited patiently and 
watched their classmates on the projection screen.

 Ryan is very concentrated playing 10,000 Leaks. He has to 
wave his arms and legs around to cover all the holes from the
fish and sharks swimming by his glass tank.

Now John and Kayla are trying their best to cover up all those 
leaks. You need to be very flexible to get this job done.

Mission Day, Part 3: Our Writing

 As you all know, there were two teams in this planet research extravaganza... the inner and the outer planets. Each team wrote a persuasive letter to a group of aliens looking to settle somwhere in the solar system. All of our Mission Day visitors voted on the letter they agreed with best during Mission Day and after counting the votes we found that Team Outer had won... Yeah Team Outer!!!

Team Inner's letter was very, very, VERY long and included arguments like the joys of acid rain, never ending amounts of cooked pizza without the oven to cook it, and Earth, a livable planet. Team Outer's letter advertised quite well if I do say so myself, as their team leader, with some sweet planet/student photographs. We argued that you would have more space to play, could enjoy never ending amounts of popsicles that don't melt, and hot, burning cores where you can still cook your dinner. Both letters were brilliant and very convincing if I do say so myself. The third graders should be very proud!

 Dalton and Trinaty

Brady and Xavier

 Binti and Sam

 Erin and Fardowsa

 Faisal and Tristan

 Amiira

 Rukia and Ryan

Sabrian and Yasmin

Abdi and Kayla

Gidhan and John