Class Publication in the Making

    

During morning meeting, students use the numeracy center (that Noah and Mohamed put together) to discuss the day's date and the amount of days that we have been in school. On Thursday, September 22, we had been in school for 18 days. One of the activities we do is to use these numbers to make our own math word problems. Students broke the 18 into tens and ones that day so our word problem was using the numbers 10, 8, 22, and whatever other number we chose. Above, is the picture of the word problem we came up with. 

Students enjoyed this word problem so much that we decided to use it as an inspiration for our writing workshop. We started with Kendra having 10 dolls and Ubah gave her 12 more. Then we individually wrote what happened next. Afterwards, "Along came Noah who ripped 8 dolls heads off..." and we decided how the story ended on our own. Students were so excited about this prompt that they wrote in complete silence for the entire writing period. Even I wrote my own story! No one wanted to share their ideas because we had decided the stories would be more unique and funny that way. At share that day, everyone was excited to read and the stars of our stories were so proud to be in everyone's writing. We had to keep writing on Friday because there was so much creativity to be shared that students were writing pages and pages on this same prompt. As a class we decided that we would be publishing our works in a class anthology. We will be spending all of this upcoming week editing and revising our pieces so we can publish our writing to share with others. Stay tuned to see the amazing writing of Spruce third graders on the blog's SPRUCE-TASTIC Writing  page. 

"Long I" and the New Magnet Board

This week our class added a new magnetic board to the front of the teacher desk. We also were given two bags of magnetic letters. Students are using the board to work on spelling patterns we find in our spelling list each week. This week we focused on the "long I" vowel pattern. We add words when we finish morning work, at snack time, or at the end of the day before we are dismissed. 

Clapping for Ana

This week during readers' workshop, students were asked to take post-it notes of their thinking. They would write text to self, text to text, or text to world connections as well as questions and any other thoughts they may have while reading. For those students who are reading chapter books, at the end of the book they will take all their post-its and put them on a "post-it note" book tracker, making a collection of thoughts from each book they choose to read. For those students reading shorter works, it was still a good way to practice recording our thoughts while reading each day. 


One specific student, Ana, did a great job tracking thought in the book Martin's Big Words The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Doreen Rappaport. Ana shared with our class at the end of reader's workshop that MLK Jr. had warmed her heart. She thought he was brave to do what he did and that his story was really inspiring. The whole class was so proud of Ana that they began to clap for her! And since her share we have read Martin's Big Words as a read aloud and then continued on to Back of the Bus by Aaron Reynolds so we could learn more about Rosa Parks (who was mentioned in Martin's Big Words). As a class, we feel for these people and are very interested in this history. Ana has also chosen to read more books about figures of the civil rights movement and seems to have found a collection in the classroom library that she really loves. So, three cheers for Ana and her post-it share that brought the whole class closer as readers!

Line Plots in the Connector

If you ask a Spruce 3rd grader, they should be able to tell you the most important parts of a line plot graph. 


You need a 

• a title
• labels
• data
• a number line
• x's

We learned this by first practicing in the classroom using data representing the amount of cookies students ate in a week. We organized the data on a line plot, labeled, and titled it. Using the data we answered questions about the amount of cookies eaten. After we felt we understood the basics of line plotting, our class ventured to the connector where we made a human birthday line plot! We marked each month with an index card label and lined up in the month we were born. We found that 8 of us including the teacher are born in March and no one is born in June or August. The March line was so long we had to move its start forward so everyone could fit! We titled it Student Birthdays in Ms. Julian's Class. 

Hard at work, and it's only the first week!!

Fortunately, many of my third graders knew each other from second grade. Many of us came from Mrs. Belanger's class, some from Mrs. Soucy and few students came from Mrs. Clark and Ms. Barber. We were already friends and felt very comfortable in our new learning environment, enabling us to get to work immediately. Here, Mohamed and Noah worked together putting our numeracy center together. They used an instruction manual, drawings, and a wrench on Thursday morning to complete this task. Thanks to their hard work our class will now be recording days spent in school through the calendar and a place value chart, and utilizing a  Venn diagram, 100s chart, and money counting tool. Having seen how easy it was for them to build the numeracy chart, I do intend to keep Noah and Mohamed on hand when our DonorsChoose donations arrive in the mail these upcoming weeks! Our class will be receiving a Lakeshore Store & Display Teaching Cart, a Lakeshore 3-in-1 Mobile Book Library, and two blue bean bags!! These items will be a great addition to our classroom meeting area and students can't wait to see them when they get here!!