Mrs. Cranley's 3rd Grade : Our Fantastic Second Week of School

Greetings Families!

The students and I had a fantastic second week of school getting comfortable in the classroom, participating with enthusiasm, successfully exercising routines and meeting expectations. I couldn't be more proud of their hard work so far. It definitely shows!

LITERACY

This week we began our Reading Street Curriculum as we explored our first story of the year, Boom Town. Our Unit 1 theme is Dollars and Sense.
Image result for boomtown story

Boom Town is a story about a little girl who moved to a small California town during the gold rush era. Once her family got settled in a small mining camp, her boredom set in, so she started making pies. Eventually her pies became so popular that she opened a business selling them. Overtime she encouraged many travelers and traders passing through to stop, settle down, and open a business of their own, doing what they do best. The small town quickly grew into a thriving community where the growing needs of the townspeople kept prompting the development of more and more businesses.

In addition to reading this story during our first week of Literacy, students learned the routines we will be using each week.

  Monday-- new Spelling Words
  (this week's focus on short vowel sounds)

-- new Big Story
(we read together on Monday and again with a partner on Tuesday.)

-- new Comprehension Skill
  (targeted all week through discussion, interactive notebook, and written responses)

Tuesday -- develop and practice the above skills through partner reading, interactive notebook activities, and written reading responses.

Wednesday-Friday- Reader's Workshop with Novels (more info later)

Some weeks students will complete a Story Test to demonstrate their comprehension of what they are reading, and other weeks they will construct clear, evidence-based written responses to show their understanding of the story.

This week's comprehension skill was sequence, which we explored in our interactive notebook.

Our interactive notebook will be a place for us to record concepts and complete exercises aimed at developing our literacy skills. Thank you so much for getting your child their 3 subject notebook!

Our interactive notebook has the following sections.

1. Reading Comprehension
2. Grammar
3. Spelling

We spent time this week setting up our first section in our notebook.

Section 1

After reading Boomtown, we explored the concept of sequence in our notebooks.

The flip chart above shows the four main events from our story in the order that they occurred. In order to do this successfully, we had to distinguish between main ideas versus details. Often, we get caught up in the interesting details of the story, and sometimes have difficulty identifying the main idea of a story. This is one of the big reading comprehension skills in 3rd grade.

Perhaps while your child is reading books at home this year, you can ask them to retell parts of the story, sharing main events in sequence. Then ask them to share some of the details surrounding an event.

After reading the story with a partner the following day, the culminating activity had the students create their own Boomtown Business. We shared our ideas and then each student created a poster showcasing their small business they would open in a growing boomtown!

WRITING

This week in writing we launched our writer's workshop.

We began by brainstorming why writers write? The students had some excellent ideas.

Next, we discussed the expectations we would need to meet during writing time, in order to maintain a positive, productive workshop. These are the ideas the students came up with.

We discussed the rationale for each of these expectations, and the students and I agreed, that Writer's Workshop is a very important time of our day.

I then introduced them to their first structured writing assignment of the year.

In order to thoroughly introduce them to the writing process, they will be completing two writing pieces that revolve around a topic they know a lot about - their summer!

The first time they write about their summer, they will write with the purpose of "informing me". The second time they write about their summer, they will write with the purpose of "entertaining me". I will teach many lessons targeting the skills they need for each stage of the writing process, and when they are finished with these first two writing pieces of the year, they should have a solid grasp of what the writing process looks like and feels like in 3rd grade. At that time, we will move on to bigger and better essay writing.

The next day, we jumped right into the first step of our writing process - Prewriting!

Prewriting is the stage of the writing process where we spend time gathering ideas and organizing them in some sort of graphic organizer. I introduced the class to one of the simplest forms of graphic organizers we will use in 3rd grade - the concept web.

I filled out the web above in order to show the students how I would begin organizing my ideas about my summer. Our first purpose is to "inform", so we will stick to the main events from the summer and not get carried away with writing about any one event for too long.

I showed them how the main idea of their paragraph should revolve around an adjective that would describe their summer. My adjective shown above, is that my summer was the best summer ever. The events I choose to write about should then relate to that main idea. Once I have my main events filled in around my main idea, I then add some basic details about each event, branching off. Again, the focus is on basic information, not a complete retelling of every detail that happened. Some of the basic details we would "eleborate" on would be who, what, when, where, why.

The students then had a chance to begin their own concept web of their summer.

They did a great job with this first step in the writing process! We will begin the second stage of the writing process this week - ROUGH DRAFT.

MATH

This week we continued our exploration of graphs.

The students explored bar graphs in Wednesday's Morning Work.

Then they graphed the results at their desk.

They also completed a bar graph for their sock drawer bar graph homework. We spent time sharing the results of this assignment the next day in class.

Next up was the venn diagram.

We discussed the difference between a bar graph and a venn diagram, and I led them to notice that the bar graph focuses on one attribute at a time, where as the venn diagram allows us to compare two different attributes. This graph compares the students in our class who like to do math alone with the students who like to use pictures to show their thinking.

We practiced making mathematical observations of this data, always being careful to recognize the number of students that fit within the larger circles. Sometimes interpreting these kinds of graphs can get a little tricky.

BASSLINE MATH ASSESSMENT

The students also completed a bassline math assessment this week. The results will be shared with you at parent conferences next month.

ART

This week we finished up our name designs.....