Decking the Halls with canned foods!

A HUGE thanks to all of my third grade friends who have brought canned foods in. The halls look oh so pretty with all of our canned goods and food items lined up! If you haven't brought any cans in, there's still some time! The CE food drive ends Thursday, December 17th. Last year, CE was able to donate over 6,000 items, which was over 9,000 lbs of food--How incredible is that?! I know we can surpass that goal.

Winter Party Fun!
Our winter party is next Friday, December 18th from 1:30-2:15. A big thanks to Mrs. Harrell for volunteering to lead the party. If you have signed up to help, you should be hearing details son. If you have any questions regarding the party, you can email her at nicoleharrell@hotmail.com

It's going to be a fun week next week leading up to Winter Break. The class has been working hard on something very special! ;) Have a great weekend!

The kids had so much fun this week as we began our SOUND unit in science.They've been taking part in several investigations that are keeping them very curious about sound! We started the unit by discussing the properties of sound, discriminating between sounds to create secret codes, and learning how vibrations cause sound. In another investigation, students experimented with a door fiddle and tone generator and  learned that different vibrations produce different pitches of sounds. They also got to use a waterphone, xylophone, kalimba, and string beam to look at how length affects pitch. This morning we read about different animals and their unusual sound sources.  Ask your child....

• How is sound created?
• What are some examples of sound sources? sound receivers?
• What happens to the pitch and vibrations when the length of the sound source changes?
• Name and describe some unusual animal sound sources.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Thankful!

We spent this afternoon talking about what it means to be thankful and what we're truly thankful for. The kids came up with so many great ideas that we'd thought we'd make one giant Thankful Collage. Take a peek at what we're thankful for....

I hope everyone has a very Happy Thanksgiving!!!

An EXCITING change!

Happy Friday everyone! Wondering why we didn’t have a spelling test this week? We’re heading in a NEW direction and have decided to make some exciting changes in our word work program in 3^rd grade!  We had noticed that while the students are really good at memorizing the 20 words on our spelling lists for a weekly test, they struggled with applying these rules and patterns to other words, and/or had trouble spelling these words correctly in their writing.  In order to be responsive to these struggles, we are changing our word study work so that it focuses on applying rules to as many words as possible and also focuses on spelling words correctly in our daily writing.  We’ve been trying out these changes in the classroom and I am thrilled with what I’m seeing!

  

Here are some key points to our new word work routine:

• A few days a week we will be using sound cards with the students—you may remember these from 2^nd grade.  We will be adding to the deck of cards all year so that the students will be continually reviewing rules and patterns from this year and previous years so that we can retain these skills.

• The first two days of the week will focus on learning new patterns and applying them to many words at varying levels of difficulty.  For example, when we learned the ‘oi’ pattern during the first week, some students brainstormed words like coin and boil while others got to disappointment and moisture--students are so excited when they apply these patterns to more challenging words.

• On our third day we will do dictated sentences where we can apply this week’s patterns along with reviewing previous weeks’ patterns.  This will also give us time for some grammar review.

• ·Thursday and Friday are spent writing stories where we focus on applying all of the spelling (and grammar) rules to our writing—first with a partner and then independently.

Students will no longer be bringing home a list of 20 words to memorize for a Friday test.  They will get a new rule, pattern, and/or word part that will be the focus for the week’s word study work.  There will be an at-home activity that will take the place of the old spelling contract that will need to be completed at some point during the week.  The formal assessment for the report card will be done in the same way as it has always been assessed since the standard is for spelling correctly in daily writing; however, students will be a little better prepared for this since our focus is being switched to spelling in our writing.  Informal assessments will be taken by teachers viewing the word lists, dictated sentences, and writing—not for grades, but so that we can see what we are doing well and what we need to work on more.  We see so much potential for this change to improve students’ spelling where it counts—in their daily writing.  We are very excited about how the rest of this year will go!