The students completed their first week of 3rd grade and I also completed my first week of 3rd grade. It’s been great!
We established important routines and procedures, engaged in a few icebreakers, and reserved a great deal of time to get started with our content. We read from the Wind and the Willows, built number bonds and arrays, studied magnetism, did some word study, and learned our first annotation symbols.
It’s been an amazing start.
I cleaned out my classroom and moved everything into my new 3rd grade room.
I’ve loved my two years in 5th and I am looking forward to new challenges and opportunities in the coming academic year.
We finished the year with a burst. We completed our study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream, a full unit on sound, multiple opportunities to identify claims, evidence and reasoning in informational text and the elements of plot in narrative (exposition, rising action, climax, and falling action.) We “stepped-up” to sixth grade with mini investigations of negative integers, area of parallelograms and right triangles, and finding rate. We also moved through several inquiry activities including Youcubed.org in which we learned about conjectures. In other words, we ended the year the way we started it, by working hard.
We had a great trip to the Capital. We are all enormously thankful for the hard work of the volunteers and their attention to making sure the visit was engaging and thorough.
We’ve been rehearsing lines and we discussed iambic pentameter. Today was a chance to move through Act 1, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Despite all of the challenges, the kids persisted with the tasks and were able to identify the exposition, rising action and conflict in what we read.
Great to see what the students are up to and how they are enjoying their time off. Parents, thanks for sharing the pictures!
The students spent part of the last two days sharing persuasive essays. Following the model in the children’s book I Wanna Iguana, students wrote back and forth to each other in their “Writing Coaches” corresponding journals. The writing was terrific and students stuck to our model of Claim-Evidence-Reasoning-Closure.
Students wrote from the perspective of pillows, tennis balls, favorite pets, celebrities, and family members.
We continued our exploration of chemistry by looking closely at how things can be put together and taken apart. Further, we worked with creating a solution and then discovering the saturation point. Students are building a important bank of understanding around dissolving, evaporation, saturation, mixture and solution.
Today we started our work with Norton Juster’s classic, The Phantom TollBooth. We did a lot of things to get us ready for this including careful observations of paintings by Salvador Dali (e.g, The Persistence of Memory) and a close reading of Abbott and Costello’s skit, “Who’s on First.” In addition we deconstructed how puns are largely based on homophones, homographs and idioms.
The hard work paid off and the student’s understanding of how author’s use word play to cause humor and confusion allowed for a successful launch of The Phantom Tollbooth.
Today we were visited by NevadaTeach students who guided us through an Engineering lesson. The experience focused on constructing a “skeleton buildings” that could make it through a simulated earthquake. Students soon discovered that some structures were more stable than others.
Room 360 