Help Us Win!!!

From now until November 10th, our class is racing to win a $200 cash prize and flip camera to improve science project based learning in our classroom. I applied for this grant through the website Learning.com and the We Are Teachers program. Our class project is found on their website and can be voted for there. My idea, Cultivating Greatness, Inner City Style, is all about students growing their own vegetable garden using an interesting gardening system called the AeroGarden.

"AeroGardens make gardening simple. They tell you when it's time to add water and nutrients and even turns grow lights on and off to simulate the sun. AeroGardens ensure fast, healthy plant growth by ensuring perfect amounts of light, water and nutrients, with no dirt, no weeds, and no mess." - www. aerogarden.com

If our class can rank in the top 5 of the 182 projects that applied, we win enough money to buy our own AeroGarden and get the flip camera to record progress. I know that if our class were to be granted the opportunity to use this system we would be entering a whole new chapter of learning and discovery in our third grade year. Please help us! Please click the link above to bring you to our project page where you can vote for our idea. 

Determining Importance

Continuing in our exploration of biographies, students and I began reading the Who Was biography for Walt Disney. On Monday we began by discussing what we already knew about Disney. We knew he had a Disney World, a Disney channel, and there were some Disney books... and that was it. 


The goal of reading this biography this week was to get students thinking about determining importance in their reading. An important comprehension skill to have while reading is being able to pick out those things that are most important to you. We talked about what determine means, what important means, and we practiced highlighting those things that were most important about Disney in the introduction and first chapter of the book. Students started by thinking every sentence was important, but we discussed how those things that were truly important about Disney were those that made him stand out above the rest, those things that made him different.


After practicing determining importance in each following chapter, students have become quite good at finding those things that stand out about Walt Disney. By Friday we learned that he drove an ambulance in World War I, was a smoker, dropped out of high school, lived in Chicago, Kansas City, and Marceline, and loved animation- movies made from multiple cartoon drawings implying movement. We will be reading more about Walt next week and continue on to other Who Was books like Louis Armstrong, The Beatles, and Pablo Picasso afterwards.

For those interested in donating to our classroom library, Who Was books are a great reading level for third grade students and provide lots of interesting information on various historical figures. The books are less than $5 and we would be interested in the following titles:

Who Was Mozart?

Who Was Abraham Lincoln?

Who Was Elvis Presley?

Who Was Albert Einstein? 

Who Was Annie Oakley?

Who Was Anne Frank? 

Who Was Helen Keller? 

Who Was MLK Jr.? 

Who Was King Tut?

Who Was Harry Houdini?

Who Was Sacajawea?

Who Was Queen Elizabeth?

Who Was Jackie Robinson?

Who Was JFK?

Who Was Obama?

Who Was Ronald Reagan?

Who Was Johnny Appleseed?

Who Was Maria Tallchief?

Who Was Claude Monet?

Who Was Babe Ruth?

Thank you in advance.

Back to Biographies

This week was our first week back on schedule after NECAP testing. Students officially have begun their biography unit and are in full gear. We received our letters from those people we chose to write biographies about and began organizing information into five categories (personal, work, favorites, family/friends, and school). After organizing information students went back and asked more questions. They asked about answers they didn't quite understand and things they still wanted to know. They also chose their two favorite topics to question more deeply because they will be the unique highlight in their written biography. 

To be more specific each student's biography will include seven chapters. The topics will be those five categories: personal, work, favorites, family/friends, and school and then those two most interesting topics they chose themselves. Examples of student work so far are:

Amira S. chose Ms. Hall the music teacher. Amira things it is very interesting that Ms. Hall's favorite game in Hungry Hippo and Ms. Hall is due to have a baby named Gavin Tripp in less than two weeks. Those are Amira's two unique chapters.

Madysen D. is writing about her Uncle Troy. Her two focuses will be Uncle Tyler's job in the Air Force and his son, Madysen's baby cousin.

 Nasra A. is writing about Mrs. Gaetani from Montello. She is focusing on Mrs. Gaetani's HUGE family and her babysitting job when she was younger. 

While students are writing their biographies, I am also focusing a piece of writing on someone very important to me. His name is Mr. Joseph Derouche. Students and I will be working together to research the five main categories and two interesting topics. I will model for them how to ask questions, organize information, and write these stories. We also have invited Mr. Derouche and Madysen's uncle to be part of the fun by letting our class interview them. We are in the middle of planning a Skype interview with Madysen's uncle and Mr. Derouche will be coming in for a visit hopefully very soon!

So Thankful!!

While taking our NECAP tests these past two weeks, third graders also took the time to write thank you letters to those wonderful people who have donated to our classroom. Since I started planning for the classroom this past summer our third graders have been given a 5'x10' purple gymnastics mat, an easel, a rolling bookshelf, 10 stools, classroom supplies (i.e. 24 reams of hole punched paper, 32 one inch binders, 2 packs of pencils, 2 packs of pens, 10 mead notebooks, and 12 glue sticks), 2 bean bags, 4 mice (for computers) and sheet metal to create a magnetic word wall and a magnetic ABC word center. These things have helped students to learn in new and exciting ways. We feel so blessed to be given these things by our donors and tried to express our feelings using letters and drawings. We also have taken multiple photos showcasing the ways we use these things. So thank you one million times over to those of you who have helped us so far!

Reader's Workshop

Everyday for 90 minutes, third graders participate in a reader's workshop. We begin with a read aloud from Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar. Next is a mini lesson talking about an important skill or strategy we can use in reading that day. Then, we move on to 30-50 minutes of silent reading. While students are reading I circulate the room meeting with them for individual reading conferences, and eventually will be pulling them for small group reading experiences. 

Students record their reading in their reader's notebooks by noting the title, author, genre, date completed, and whether or not the book was too easy, just right, or challenging for them as a reader. Reader's notebooks also hold copies of class anchor charts we create during mini lessons. An anchor chart is a reminder of certain information the student might need while reading (examples would be "Ways We Choose Books", "What I Think When I Read", or "Why I Would Abandon My Book"). Students refer back to these charts when they don't remember the skills and strategies we practice in class. 

Reader's notebooks are also a home to your student's letters about their reading. Once a week, children write about their reading. They record the title,  author, and anything they may be thinking about their reading in a letter addressed to me. I write them back giving them suggestions for further reading or asking them questions about the things they have said. It is a good communication tool for students to use when learning new reading strategies and growing in their reading skills. 

After silent reading time, students gather together on the purple gymnastics mat for share time. We share our reading, the strategies we practiced while reading, or those things we wrote about our reading. This is a great time for recommending books to classmates.

The newest addition to our reading workshop time are the two blue bean bags featured above and a soon to be pile of pillows. Students love to read and lounge in various places in the room and these comfortable additions make that more doable. 

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!