Holiday Concert 2015!

For those of you unable to make it to our Holiday concert today. Enjoy the clips from today's concert! :)

Hour of Code

We had a BLAST coding today! I am sure many of your children came home tonight wanting to code some more! I am amazed by their ability to problem solve in order to complete the tasks they were given today. We will continue to keep coding a regular activity in our classroom. I think we have some future computer programmers in our class! :)

Happy coding!

'Tis the Season!

While everyone is busy getting ready for the holidays, we are busy learning in our classroom! 

Holiday Card Exchange

The class is very excited because our cards are beginning to come in like wildfire! We have had cards from California, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, Illinois, Maine, and Wisconsin! It has been so exciting to read about these schools and their average temperature during December. Maine has been the coldest so far! Their average temperature is only 11 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Coding

Another cool activity we have began is coding. This is a weekly math rotation in our classroom. This is also the national week of coding. We are participating in an hour of coding tomorrow with millions of students around the world! How cool is that! Coding promotes problem solving, creativity, and persistence. It is awesome to see the class not give up and keep trying until they find a solution!

Informational Experts

Our reading and writing units have really joined together nicely! The class began their second informational writing piece after our Thanksgiving break. This was a partner writing project and all work is being done on the chromebooks. Each writing partnership decided on a topic, something that they wanted to research and learn more about. Then, we went to the library to check out a selection of books that we thought could help our research. Each partnership began taking notes on their topic. They created a google slide presentation and shared it with each other and myself. They made a table of contents to guide their research and then each section became another slide. First, they practiced listing their notes with bullet points and then we began forming those notes into paragraphs. We are still in the process of editing our paragraphs, adding pictures, highlighting glossary words, and creating our glossaries.

Today we began working on creating a visual presentation for our topics in reading. They will be presenting their topics to teach the class. They are creating a poster that shares the information from their book, but in a more visually aesthetic manner. I have been so impressed with how collaboratively they have worked in their groups! They are doing a phenomenal job! Take some time to ask them about what topic they are researching and what they have learned so far!

An Afternoon of Projects!

Boy did we have a busy afternoon! Your children had 2 big projects to accomplish! 

First, we are participating in a Holiday Card Exchange. The class did a great job creating cards and addressing the envelopes to send them all across the country! Be on the lookout for more posts with locations of where our cards are coming from!

Second, they had a very important job of disguising a turkey to save it from the dinner table on Thanksgiving! They were very creative with their ideas for a disguise. 

Happy Thanksgiving!! 

We are Thankful for PJS and Books!

We had a very "comfy" day today with our PJS, blankets, and favorite stuffed animals! 

But do not FEAR, learning was definitely HERE!

We began our afternoon watching a clip from the National Geographic Cheetahs video. We practiced comparing and contrasting between the movie and our informational book, Cheetahs, we have been studying! We are also practicing using our accountable talk discussion stems to share our thinking (I noticed...I wonder... I think... I realize...)

After that, we gathered with the rest of the 3rd and 4th graders to listen to a story read by Mr. Herlache and have some time together to enjoy reading! It was a blast! These 3rd graders are definitely book worms!