Student of the week: Parker writing on literature circles.... leave him a comment

Hi, My name is Parker and I am the guest blogger this week. I will be talking about something we started this week. It is called literature circles. We had 5  books and had  to chose our top 3. She tried to get us into our number 1 book. I got the book Bunnicula. The other books were Sarah, Plain, and Tall, The Chocolate Touch,and Stuart Little.  

We are doing 3 jobs like prediction professor, questioner, and word wizard. Questioner makes questions they have about the book, word wizard looks up words in the dictionary that they did not understand in the book, and prediction professor  stops in the book to try to predict what will happen.

I hope you enjoyed my blog entry! BYE!!!

Biome day!

 Check out the post-its notes with writing about what we learned during our biome unit.

 A book about our last biome.

Biome vocabulary in groups

Biome animal sort with animal crackers. Students had to place their animal cracker into the correct biome. Students then were able to eat their crackers afterwards.

Here are some samples of the animal biome writing from homework last week

 snowy owl

Artic Wolves

snowy owl

Our fraction poster

Writing in our social studies journal about natural resources 

Being a scout: Catching students with good behaviors and passing them stickers 

Making golden tickets from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

We read this book about economics. Alexander was trying to save his money but kept spending. We talked about economic choices. 

Author Skype: Amy Dyckman

 Amy Dyckman skyped us all the way from New Jersey. She is the author of "Boy and Bot" and "Tea Party Rules". We have read "Tea Party Rules" and soon will read " Boy and Bot".  She was so fabulous and passionate about writing. She encouraged student to write and draw pictures on any topic they were interested in. She said maybe one day they will become authors and work with her! Check out these book trailers if you want to know what these books are about.: http://mrschureads.blogspot.com/2013/10/author-ame-dyckman.html

We are choosing our literature circle books. Ask what book your child is going to read. We are so excited to be starting literature circles where students can read together in groups and work on meta-cognition strategies. 

We started our school wide run. Students will be walking/running  every Wednesday for about twenty minutes. After a student get twenty laps, they will get a charm. We enjoyed getting fit and listening to music!! I am going to join them next time in running/walking =)

Oil in the Wetlands

Students are trying to take oil out of the buckets. They are practicing being "scientists" by having to take oil out of a wetland or ocean after an oil spill. Students learned how messy and hard it is to get the oil out. They had to strategize and work together to figure out how to remove the oil. Students were using the tools to get the oil out but it was a slow process. Ask them about this experience and what oil does to the wildlife and the environment around it. 

Student blogger for March 3rd: Marek

Marek's blog: take a look and leave a comment for him.

He offers some good advice...

Have you ever tried trying out for a sport? Well first of all don’t be nervous. Don’t give up even If you are not trying. Be a good sport by helping people up if they fall. Play hard if you want to make the team. Then once you get to know the  coaches then just play hard.

Remember Never ever get nervous.

Play really hard and practice to get better.

Bella the Monster

Check out Isabella's presentation on her monster that she created 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

We started a new book last week:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.
Students love it so far and think it is very funny. He is one of our classes favorite authors. Ask your students so far about this book. Ask them their opinion and to summarize what we have read so far.

Charlie Bucket

Willy Wonka

Check out this book trailer on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Book trailer for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Third grade scholars

A fraction book that we read this week that introduced fractions.
Here is someone reading the book out loud if you want to check it out

Story being read aloud if you want to listen to it again

Art that we made. Each box represents a part of you and all the boxes put together represent all of you or the "whole". We were working on fractions for this. Check out the examples above. Have students make more of these working on other numbers like fifths or eighths.

Creating words that have prefixes and suffixes. Students got one point for a base word and 3 points if had either a prefix or suffix. Students received 7 points if had a base word, prefix, and a  suffix. Most students made at least fifty words and some made over a hundred. We will do this activity again. The students enjoyed making the words and some of the words they made were ones they never heard of or knew the meaning of. 

Scholastic Book Fair- Deciding on what books we want

Learning about the Wetlands and Cattails 

Commenting on classroom blogs. We are learning on what makes a "good " comment. A good comment should have a compliment, a question, connection or more information you can add on, and then a closing. Practice leaving a "good" comment on our blog!

Learning to spell words that have to do with fractions: half, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths, ninths and tenths.  

Biome tear art with Ms. Fraser's class 

Bean bag multiplication with our 8's

Practicing for a fire during our fire drill 

These photos are making parts of speech posters in class and then presenting them. Students became the teacher and led the instruction to the parts of speech. Students turned the words into a song. Students chose one noun and then they had to come up with five adjectives, verbs, and prepositional phrases around that noun.