Upcoming Important Dates!

This time of year is always packed with tons of important dates and reminders! Please take a look at what's coming up:

Friday, February 26, 6:30-8:30
Family Fitness Night

Monday, February 29
8:45-9:25 ISTEP Applied Skills Testing (Math)

Tuesday, March 1
 8:45-9:20 ISTEP Applied Skills Testing (ELA Section 1)

Wednesday, March 2
8:30-8:55 ISTEP Applied Skills Testing (ELA Section 2)

9:05-10:05 ISTEP Applied Skills Testing (ELA Section 3)

Friday, March 4-21 
CE's Annual Flower Sale Fundraiser begins!

Visit flowers4ce.com for more info.!

 As you can see, next week begins the first section of ISTEP. It is EXTREMELY important to have your child here on time each day for testing. Please try to schedule any appointments around our testing windows. We want to make sure our students are getting a great night's sleep and eating a healthy breakfast each morning so that they're energized the entire time. The kids were so excited when they found out the Amusement Park theme for ISTEP this year!--Don't wait in line, its your time to shine! :)

We worked through our first practice test today and the kids did such an AWESOME job. There was LOTS of clipping up happening for all of the positive attitudes and hard work I was seeing. We really want to make this first time of testing for students a positive one! Staying calm will help your child stay calm. =)

All you need is LOVE!

Lots of love was spread around our classroom last Friday. We had a LOVEly Valentine's party. Thank you so much to everyone who helped out. The class had a blast and I know they  loved looking through their Valentine's bag! In case you were not able to make it, take a look at some of the fun pictures from Friday!

Writing Clinics

You may have heard your child talking about spending time with other third grade teachers and friends during writing time this week! Every so often we like to switch things up a bit to keep the kids EXCITED about their learning. We've spent a good portion of our year becoming great narrative writers. One important piece of narrative writing is remembering to include figurative language. Students learned that figurative language helps your writing come alive. Because there's many forms of figurative language, we'd thought it would be fun to hold writing clinics. Students rotated to a different teacher each day to learn, practice, and apply a total of 4 different types of figurative language--Similes, Hyperbole, Personification, and Onomatopoeia. It was a wonderful opportunity for students to collaborate with their peers from other classrooms! They came back to class so excited each day and immediately started looking for figurative language in the books they read. They quickly found out that figurative language appears A LOT!

See if your child can define and give examples of hyperbole, personification, similes, and onomatopoeia. Have them share with you any forms of figurative language they see in books they're reading, on TV shows, or even in songs! Figurative language is the perfect way to take their writing to the next level!

Our FAVORITE time of the day!

If we could have read aloud time all day, I  would teach it in a heartbeat! It is our FAVORITE time of the day.  It's the one time of the day where we can  unwind after recess and lunch, but also keep our minds working. We have to be VERY flexible day-to-day in third grade with everything going on around us--schedule changes, school convocations, testing, etc. Sometimes we double-up on subjects, rearrange things to make our schedule work, take some things out and move it to the next day, but the one time of day we don't mess with is our read aloud time--too many sad faces for my heart to handle if I even mention having to possibly skip it! Some of our BEST discussions and light bulb moments occur during this small chunk of time so I am ALWAYS okay with shifting something else around to  make time for read aloud. We recently finished reading The One and Only Ivan, which they LOVED! For our next read aloud, I wanted the kids to be involved in choosing what we read. I chose two different genres of books, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai and the ultimate classic The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I read the first chapters of each and had them vote on which one they'd like me to continue  reading. Every single student voted The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe which I was thrilled to see since it is such a classic! So many amazing authors and new books come out all the time that we often forget about the oldie but goodies. They are LOVING this book so far and even beg me to read a little bit at the end of the day too! Here's what our read aloud time looks like each day....

We always do a quick recap of what happened in the story the day before using these fun story cards! Each story card has an important character or object that's significant to the story. The kids LOVE holding the cards throughout read aloud time, but they must share how their card is important to the story before getting to hold it. I love this because it tells me who truly understands the story.

 




Time to read the next chapter! During this time students REACT to the story by making predictions and asking and answering questions.

Every couple of chapters, students illustrate and write a quick blurb of the most important parts of the story. Illustrations are then chosen to be added to our story timeline. The kids LOVE this part! It's also a fun activity for our visual learners!

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!!!