Reasons I love coming to school

• We start our day sitting in a circle saying "good morning." It brings a smile to my face.

• During the morning circle student share something about themselves.  It's fun when a pet comes to a visit, or we get to see colorful journals or old toy cars, or see a video made at home, or hear stories about after school games or time spent with a family. With each sharing I get to know the students a bit better.

• The students have learned the routines, they know what to do during word study, snack and read aloud, mental math time, during reading and writing time, and when they have independent study. I have moments when everyone is working and no one needs my help and I can actually just sit for a moment and observe the students working and my heart swells with joy.

• I love, love, love to hear comments like "I want to keep writing" or "Can I do more mental math?" or "When is it time to read?' or "Can we share our work." It's music to my ears.

• It's never boring in grade 3. Sometimes the classroom looks like a big mess, papers on tables, pencils and pens rolling around, I-Pads and books in various places, and a busy buzz pouncing around the room. This chaos and noise are the signs of learning and creating. Like this week, the students had on their desks: big poster papers for making "Family Stories" mind-maps, folders with drafts for personal narratives, rulers and pencils for drawing shapes in math,  papers and pencils for drawing pictures for the digital stories, I-Pads for writing, blogging, mental math and digital stories. I can't wait to share their creations with you next week.

• Our classroom is rich with compliments and support. Quite often, without any prompts from me, the students offer help or say positive comments to each other.  On Fridays we finish the day with sitting in a circle, everyone picks a classmates name and shares what positive things they noticed about the student whose name they picked.  They don't forget me either. "You read poetically," is a comment I will treasure from this week.

• The best part is to show the students the pre-assessments and the final assessments and see their faces glow in pride when they notice the growth.  Sometimes it's small steps, sometimes big, but it is always the learning and practice they have done that makes the difference. 

• Occasionally I have moments when I am a tad bit disappointed that the work didn't get done as fast as I planned or the result of the work was not as grand as I envisioned. Then I take a deep breath and remind myself that I am together with third graders and it takes time to grow. Instead of looking for what isn't there yet, I celebrate what the students know and can do already. Even small growth deserves a celebration. 

• We finish our day, sitting in a circle clapping and saying, " One, two, three, yay! We had a great day!" It brings a smile to my face.

Working together to create an example for expressing inferences

It is easier to work together to revise texts about reading and thinking. Yesterday we focused on improving our summary and finding themes and ideas from the story "Swimmy." Today we looked for evidence from the text to support our thinking.

Now the students work in groups to revise texts about other Leo Lionni books.

Daily mental math

Beginning of this month we set a goal tomaster basic addition and subtraction facts and show growth in mental addition. Every single day we take 15 minutes to practice, practice, practice. We use different materials and tools to practice. Every Friday we have tested our skills. Tomorrow we will take one more test and then reflect how well we have achieved our goal. 

This week

We are wrapping up our UOI "Family Stories." Students are creating  mind- maps tat show what they know now about the reasons why people tell family stories, how you can find out about the past, what could you find out and what is something they learned during this unit. 

Digital stories are half way done. Students are experimenting with adding effects, changing the sequesnce, and recording their voice. You should hear and feel the buzz of the digitalw riting workshops with Ms. Glyka.

In math students have had two opportunities to show what they have learned and know about 2-D shapes. On Friday we will have one more mental matht est and then we reflect on how well the students achieved their goal for mastering basic addition.

In reading we have talked about inferring as a reading strategy. 

Inferring allows to look beyond literal text. It is our thinking based on combination of the text, our experience, knowledge, questions, values, creativity, logic and thoughtfulness. 

When we read we can infer themes and main idea, feelings and emotions of the character, points of views, and/or lessons learned.

Each time we make an inference we can ask ourselves some guiding questions:

What is the inference I am making?

What information did I use to make the inference? 

What evidence in the book supports my inference?

How good is my thinking?

Do I need to change my thinking?

We will take time to practice the skills of inferring, expressing our thinking and using the text to support our thinking.

We have continued blogging. I just love the excitement that this experience has brought into writing. Having others commenting, having an audience besides the teacher, has made the students eager to write. Plus, thinking more of conventions.

I have sent all of you invitations to view the blog. Slice of Grade 3

Please, be kind and remember that we are still learning how to blog and comment. Your comments are very welcome.

We are getting closer to finishing the final drafts of personal narratives. Using Google Drive, the students wrote comments to each other to help with the revision process. I hope that the stories will be  ready  for publishing next week.

Revision: word choice

Math: student teachers: part 4

Digital story workshop

Students:
How to add pictures?

How to add text and make it bigger?

How to add music?

How can I change the order of pictures?

Where can I see what I have so far?

Look, what I have made already!

Experimenting: A Cat Story

Revision: endings

Writes create powerful endings to leave a lasting impression on the reader.

A good ending can keep the reader thinking or carrying a feeling about the text long after it's finished. 

We looked at some different possibilities.

An ending with a message

An ending with a thought

An ending with a feeling

A surprising ending

A circular ending

Math: student teachers: part 3

Revision: transitions

What words and phrases help us to show passage of time, show two things happening at the same time, or move from one scene to another?

From: http://totallyterrificintexas.blogspot.com/2012/03/transition-words.html

Thank you, Patricia Polacco for the examples. The kids were able to recognize where these terms came from.

UOI: digital story

It took us a full lesson to listen to the different stories and interesting facts everyone was sharing from their interviews. I loved when students used phrases like "I didn't know..." or "It really surprised me..."

Now that the students have collected stories about their parents or grandparents through making a time-line, creating a Venn diagram, and conducting an interview, they can decide what they would like to include in their digital story. Like with any writing, they will make a draft first. We are using a paper comic strip to help to decide what pictures and texts they wish to include.

Math: student teachers: part 2

Revision: beginnings

Yesterday we read some beginnings from different books, looked at some collected examples and a list of possibilities for different beginnings. Then the students tried out three different leads for their own personal narratives and chose one to use intheir writing. The beginning is like an invitation. The writer has to make it interesting so the reader would wish to continue reading.

Math: student teachers: part 1

Estonoan Culture field trip: Bastion tunnels

We had an exciting (and a bit spooky) historical field trip to Bastion tunnels.
When you are looking for something to do on a weekend or for a place to take your visitors, this could be a place to go. It is not suitable for little children as it can be scary.

Digital story telling

We had a guest teacher Ms. Glycka in class today, leading a discussion of what makes a good digital story and playing with a new digital story app called Cute Cut.

A good digital story has

1. A story we want to tell that brings an emotion to the viewer.

2. Pictures or video that illustrate the story.

3.  Words that have to be chosen carefully dpending on the audience.

4. Music that fits with the mood of the story.

More revision

Adding dialogue to writing makes a story more livley. Today we looked at different ways one can include detail.

First I shared two of my writing examples with the students and right away they noticed how my first writing had only the spoken words in the dialogue but the second one had words and additional action to show what was happening when someone was speaking.

Then we looked how we can include how something was said or use a variation of the word "said."

Finally we looked  how the spoken words can come first, last or squeeze the speaker in between them.

Examples from: Crafting Writers by Elizabeth Hale

I haven't looked at the revised drafts yet. Tomorrow I will find out, how much of what I showed, the student chose to try out in their writing.
We will continue with revision for the next two weeks (word choice and sentence structure next week and text structure the week after.)

Blogging together

 

We have started blogging together. It is a closed blog right now. First we want to figure out what and how to blog, how to save and publish. Then we wish to learn how to write really good comments. When we have practiced a bit, we will be ready to share our writing with you and hope to get comments from you.  I will (when we are ready) put the link to the Slice of Grade 3 blog in this blog's sidebar for an easy access. Stay tuned.

In the head of the reader

The students already know that a lot goes on in the head of a reader. They also know that the different strategies that the readers use, don't happen in isolation. When you ask questions, you use your background knowledge ( connections) to find some answers. Sometimes you read a text and have to use your background knowledge and experience to make sense of what is happening, why the characters are acting in a certain way, what they are feeling, and what might happen. This strategy is called inferring. This is already higher level thinking and asks the reader to look beyond the literal meaning of the text.

On Monday and Tuesday I read....

..and we talked about the feelings and thoughts of the characters, about thoughtlessly destroying something that is valuable to someone else, about the difficulties of apologizing, and about apologies with action.

Today I started reading....

..and since it was a text with a new text structure for us, we had to first figure out who the characters were and what was going on. The whole book is written in a form of a dialogue. I look forward to reading on tomorrow.

Digging deeper into family stories

Ms.Helelyn came this Monday and gave useful advice on how to interview parents or grandparents.

Then she paired the students up and they got to practice both roles -the interviewer (asking questions) and the interviewee (answering questions.)

I hope that the interviews are going well at home and the adults have fun remembering their childhood and telling stories. Don't be timid to share stories that maybe were not asked in the interviews. 

First draft written and moving on

On Monday we reviewed all the advice the students had put together to help the,selves to write the best first draft. The. They wrote, wrote, wrote. 

Yesterday I showed them their first drafts and pointed out what they had done well already. 

Some of them had a lot of writing, all of them had chosen a topic that mattered to them, some stories reminded me of other stories we had read ( this is a positive thing  for a young writer -  to write  like another author.)

The students already knew that writers write many drafts to revise their work to have the best possible choice of words, voice and structure.

On Monday we looked at different ways to include senses. Today we looked at different ways to include feelings and thoughts. One of the students mentioned that we should have had examples of including some older memories into our narratives. Such great writerly thinking.

After looking at the examples, the students experimented with different sentences that they could include in their personal narratives. We will explore and experiment with dialogue tomorrow.

This is just a beginning. More revision waits for us next week.

Examples from: Crafting Writers by Elizabeth Hale

Getting ready to teach others

Last  week we learned about lines and angles. For the next two weeks (or more if necessary) we will learn about 2-D shapes. this learning is with a twist. The students are in pairs and are responsible in becoming an expert in one area and teaching others about their topic.

Here's the task:

Learning outcome:

o   to be able to sort, describe and model 2-D shapes, using appropriate vocabulary.

o   to understand that shapes are classified and named according to their properties.

Group:

Names:

Task 1

v to use various resources (books, models, websites, apps) to learn about

______________________________________________________

Task 2

v to present your learning and teach others

·      You can create models using various tools (paper and pencil, a ruler, geo app, toothpicks, geo boards, straws and other objects, scissors and colored papers)

·      You can find examples from real life (use pictures from internet or take your own photos)

·      You can find and create art.

·      You can include a poem, a dance, or a song to help others.

Task 3:

v Check that others learned what you taught

 

Stealing from authors

Don't be alarmed by the title. When we speak about stealing from authors, we look at different texts and think about what we would like to do as the author does.

One day we looked at student work and put it in order from simple writing to great writing. What did the great writers do to make us enjoy their stories.

Today we chose parts of texts from our favorite books, read out loud to each other, discussed what made the text good, and added to our yesterday's list.