Mrs. Cranley's 3rd Grade : October 24

Hello 3rd Grade Families!

I hope everyone is feeling healthy and well-rested. As you know, the recent week has taken a toll on many people's health, and hopefully the 3-day weekend allowed us all a little extra time to regain our strength.

SHORT WEEK

The students and I will have just two short days together this week, so we will be deviating from our usual routine - no spelling, no reading log, and no math homework. Although, I strongly encourage all students to keep reading, especially if they are participating in Oregon Battle of the Books!

CONFERENCES

I'm looking forward to seeing you all at parent conferences this week.

Here's a recap of our last two weeks in the classroom.

LITERACY

One of our recent big stories we read was A Days Work by Eve Blunting. In the context of our Unit 2 theme Smart Solutions, this story was about a boy who, in his attempt to be helpful, creates a bigger problem for he and his grandfather.

With this story, the students practiced their character analysis comprehension skill. After reading the story a second time with a partner, they filled out a graphic organizer with evidence from the text that showed both the character's words and actions that demonstrate the same character trait.

After completing this pre-writing step in their interactive notebook,

they worked independently to write their character essay.

The students are really getting the hang of writing in the context of reading.

Our next big story in our Reading Street Curriculum was Prudy’s Problem by Carey Armstrong-Ellis.

This selection was a fantasy story about a girl who had a problem collecting things – she just couldn’t throw anything away. She collected everything from rocks, to paper napkins, to shiny silver wrappers. Her mother and father were very concerned about the clutter and tried to convince her that she had a problem. Finally, she realized she had a problem when she couldn’t get to her desk in her bedroom. Prudy’s problem eventually was solved when her friends and family all pitched in and built her a museum to organize and showcase her collections. It was a success, and people from all around came to view Prudy’s unique collections.

Our reading comprehension skill this week was identifying the main idea of the story, as well as locating details from the story that support it. We recorded this information in our interactive notebook.

This week instead of completing a reading response task, students read the story to themselves, and then completed a Reading Comprehension Test.

READER'S WORKSHOP

As a reminder, we run our Reader's Workshop Wednesday through Friday. Please visit our classroom volunteer sign-up page to schedule a day to come and read with students.

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0d4faaa72ea5f94-classroom

We need volunteers!

For the past 2 weeks students have spent time in their reading groups reading various novels.

For the first couple of sessions, we spent time practicing our summary writing skills. This will be a task we will work on all year. The expectation is that students understand how to summarize the main events from their reading, without going into too much detail. There is often the urge to retell everything they can remember, which is an easier approach than having to think carefully about the main events that took place. Their summaries will gain more sophistication as the year goes on.

In addition to writing a summary, we continued to work on character analysis. This task involves two steps.

STEP 1: CHARACTER STUDY

Study the character while you read, by recording the character's thoughts, actions, words, and feelings that help you understand their personality.

STEP 2: CHARACTER ESSAY

Write a paragraph describing their personality using evidence from the text.

Other ongoing skills we will target during Reader's Workshop will include building vocabulary, illustrating our visualizations as we read, making connections, drawing conclusions, and identifying cause and effect relationships.

STORY MOUNTAINS

Most students have finished their story mountain of our Class Clown Novel Study. The mountain visual represents the story structure from the book- character, setting, problem, climax, solution. This is one of a few book projects students will be encouraged to complete each time they finish reading a novel.

WRITING

By now, all students have had an opportunity to write a brief informational writing piece about their summer, and a brief entertaining writing piece about their summer.

They have also had an opportunity to do some creative writing as they each created a spooky narrative story in the spirit of Halloween.

Currently, they are in the middle of completing their first writing assessment of the year. On Thursday they were given a writing prompt and asked to write a story. I explained to the class that unlike the other things they've written this year, this time it will be a "test" of what they can do on their own. They've each completed several practice runs of our 3rd grade writing process, so most students were very comfortable getting right to work.

They will continue working on these writing assessments this week, and their work will be shared with you at conferences.

MATH

In math, we spent the last two week's reviewing our Unit 2 concepts and completing a two part assessment.

Students spent several days completing a series of math stations aimed at Unit 2 Place Value review.

Students then completed a two-part assessment on Unit 2.

We also visited the concept x,y coordinates, as we plotted points on a coordinate grid, that when connected, created a Halloween Jack-o-lantern picture.

I have a variety of holiday math scatter plots we will do throughout the year.

AMAZON RAINFOREST PEOPLE

Last week students had a chance to bring their Amazon Rainforest identity to life, as they created a self-portrait collage of themselves as a South American logger, farmer, native, tourism agent, or pharmaceutical agent.

RAINFOREST COUNCIL MEETING

Sadly, the Rainforest Council Meeting took place without me, but I am confident that the students performed their roles well. The goal of the activity was for students to authentically grapple with the issue of the disappearing Rainforest and it's impact on various groups of people. Following the discussion, the conversation should have led to the concept of "forest management". Currently, Oregon has developed responsible practices for managing a variety of goals with our forests - the three main goals being timber, wildlife, and recreation.

The students have this background knowledge, so they should have come to a similar conclusion as a result of the discussions. SOLUTION: Establish a "forest management" program in the Amazon Rainforest, that meets the needs of the various people who need the forest.

The final assignment then, was to create a logo that reflects the goals of their newly established Rainforest Management Program.

Here's what they came up with.

It was fun to see who the students chose to represent in their logo, and who they chose not to represent.

ART

Our most recent art lesson was led by one of our own students, Gabe Rubin.

Gabe is a very talented artist, and has demonstrated a strong passion for drawing Manga style characters. Manga is a style of Japanese cartoon drawing often seen in comic books and graphic novels. He is so skilled at this style of drawing, that I asked him if he wouldn't mind teaching us all how to draw Manga characters.

The class was super engaged and respectful during Gabe's art lesson. He did a fantastic job explaining and demonstrating the process.

We started by learning how to draw "Manga Eyes".

Next, we practiced another set of eyes, as we created a portrait of ourselves on the other side.

My portrait, not realistic.

Finally, we learned a manga style of cartoon called "chibi" manga, which is characterized by big heads and short bodies. Here Gabe led us through the drawing of a Chibi Manga Tiger.