Class Superlatives

Mrs. Shaffer, Ms. Symons, Mrs. Rossignol & Mrs. Phillips' Class Superlatives 2014 on PhotoPeach

MOSH

On Tuesday, we were able to take a field trip to MOSH.  We explored the museum and visited all the exhibits, visited the planetarium, and had lunch by the Friendship Fountain.  What a fun day!

Let's Sing, America!

Mark your calendars for Tuesday, May 27th at 6:00 pm.  We will be performing our musical called Let's Sing, America! Students have been working hard all year in music class to learn the songs for this performance. This week, students began learning the movement for each song and were assigned lines to recite during the performance.  Students will be required to memorize their lines and recite them with expression as part of their speaking standards. Students will be required to wear jean bottoms (shorts, pants, skirt) and a plain white or red topic (no logos or graphics).  Students may also wear any patriotic accessories (red, white and blue) that they would like. A letter with this information will be coming home in next week's Tuesday Folder.

Students: What song is YOUR favorite?

Operation: Egg Drop

Can you design a package that keeps an egg from breaking when we drop it from the 2nd floor of the school?  We challenged our students with creating a container to protect a raw egg from the drop.  They came up with some amazing ideas!!!! 

 

The final tally was 17 eggs did not break, while 14 eggs did break. 

Our Class is Connected with Kindness :)

Here is our second student who was chosen to receive our kindness award for the week!

Character Education

Today, we started a new character education tradition for our classroom family.  We choose one of our students and she stood in front of the white board and everyone in our class wrote something nice about her. 

Here is what our class said - we certainly agree! 

Always nice to others

Always positive

Sweetest girl in CCE

Astonishing kindness

Always positive – never gives up

Stops bullying

A nice friend in the whole school

Always sweet and kind to others

Never mean

Queen of the world

Let’s everyone play

Helpful

Fair to others

Always has something good to say

Best girl in the world

Kind

Polite and helpful

Helps others and is kind and sweet

Very good role model

Kind heart and sweet girl

Nice friend to everyone

 

 

Salt in His Shoes

This week we are reading books with common themes to help motivate us for the big FCAT! Today we read Salt in His Shoes, a story about a young Michael Jordan, who is smaller than the other players, learns that determination and hard work are more important than size when playing the game of basketball.We know that our hard work throughout this school year will help us be successful on the test!We are ready to ROCK the FCAT!

Using Mentor Texts to Create Powerful Introductions

Today we researched mentor texts and specifically looked at the introductions these authors wrote. We read the introductions with an extra powerful lens to notice how they were written. We then discussed what kinds of things the authors did to create their powerful introductions. We learned many new ways to write engaging introductions for our informational books and chapters as well!

Lucky Charms Fractions and Graphing

In honor of St.Patrick's Day, we used Lucky Charms to sort out the marshmallows and make fractions and a bar graph out of them. The denominator was the total amount of marshmallows each student had and the numerator was the number of each different marshmallows they had. We then compared our graphs.

Teaching like an Expert

Today we began our writing on information books. We learned that information writers are teachers. When you write an information book, you are teaching about your topic. Today, students got to teach their peers about their topic that they are an expert on. We learned some really interesting and neat things about each others' topics!

Attitude Spray

Have you heard about our Attitude Spray?? It is a special secret "potion" that only students who believe will receive! We use this "potion" to help us have a good attitude before we take our tests. We learned that attitude is everything and if you have a good attitude before your test, you will work harder and try your best on the test!! Ask your child if they chose to receive this "potion" before their reading test today. :)

Fraction Frenzy!

In math, we have started a new unit all about fractions.  Students are sharpening their skills every day about this new and exciting concept.  Here are some of the charts that we have made so far based on the work we have done. 

Notice that "drawing" fractions is NOT a strategy that we are using in class. Being able to accurately represent fractions (equal sized wholes and equal parts), is very difficult for students.  Therefore, we use other strategies to more accurately compare fractions. For example, when compare 3/8 and 5/6 students might compare them to 1/2.  Students might say "I know that 3/8 is 1/8 less than a half and 5/6 is 1/6 MORE than a half; therefore, 3/8 < 5/6." This method of comparing fractions is MUCH more accurate than attempting to draw a representation.

Using an inequality sign (<,>, or =) compare the following fractions: 5/8 and 2/4. Leave a comment with your answer! 

Readers to Leaders: BINGO

Today, we celebrated together as a 3rd grade for those students who met the 2nd quarter reading goal.  We played Wild Bingo!!! 

Happy 100th Day of School!!

High Interest Nonfiction Books

This week we will continue our study of nonfiction. We are really enjoying reading our nonfiction texts. Unfortunately, we don’t have a large amount of high interest nonfiction books in our class library. We are asking for any nonfiction book donations to keep our students engaged. We have found that students really enjoy these DK Readers. They are high interest nonfiction books with lively illustrations and engaging age-appropriate stories. We really appreciate any donation! :)

Hard Work Pays Off

Today, our school got a visit from Adrian Peterson, Georgia Southern alum and former running back for the Chicago Bears. 

He came to share his message with us to strive to meet our goals.  We were able to hear his amazing story with a great message that includes his family and parents, hard work, and how a very difficult speech disability only motivated him to fight harder to reach his goals in life. 

His book, "Don't Dis My Abilities" is inspiring and full of hope. 

Synthesizing

Today we learned about synthesizing-when our thinking changes as we read. We read Animal Dads and students were shown the process of synthesizing with this nonfiction text. We first previewed the book by looking at the title and picture on the cover to predict what the book was about. As we read a few pages, our understanding deepened which caused our thinking to change some. We used examples from the text to support our thinking. Students then read through their nonfiction books to put together their new learning about their topic.