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!