Curl up in a blanket with your kids this Sunday evening and.....
- Check out the Harris Burdick website and read stories written by other kids!
- Listen to the NPR "All Things Considered" podcast about Ivan the gorilla!
Have you explored the link buttons from my last academic blog post?
Curl up in a blanket with your kids this Sunday evening and.....
Every child now has their own Weebly website. I strongly encourage parents to help their students with their websites at home. You can add photos, post poems, add artwork -whatever your child wants to do! It’s their page let them be creative! I'm encouraging kids to keep a personal blog, as well. They can blog about school, sports, home activities, special projects, and more! If you choose to do a personal blog, please be sure to read your student's writing. This will help ensure safety, appropriateness, and will help you to stay connected! Students are learning about internet safety and know that we never put last names, addresses, or specific personal information on our sites-even though they are password protected!
We will update pages as often as we can at school. Students are learning the tricky process of scanning in work, saving in specific file locations, then uploading to websites. However, with 26 kids this can be tricky! Therefore, if you want your page to truly represent your child’s growth, please help!
To log in and edit go to students.weebly.com
Username: firstname+first initial of last name+qae3
"A Child needs encouragement like a plant needs water" Kelly Bartlett (Positive Discipline)
Please help us by commenting on our websites! I encourage students and parents to view the websites of kids in our classroom and leave encouraging comments!
When commenting on a piece of writing or art it may be helpful to start with one of the following stems:
- I wonder ....
- I really like this because ....
- This makes me remember .... This reminds me....
- I can tell you worked hard because ....
- I noticed ...
Try to avoid - "Good Job", "Way to Go!" , "Nice Work" - while these comments are meant well, the goal is to provide feedback that invites us think about something, consider a change, or move in another direction. Positive comments that encourage, help children feel capable and connect us closer to each other.
Leaving comments on our classroom blog as well as the blogs of every student is important. Receiving feedback about the work you have published for our larger to community to view is encouraging and makes our work feel valued. It is fun to read the comments of others, which often inspires or prompts you to leave a comment in the thread! Make it a weekly activity. Sit down with your child and explore our class sites. Start filling our blogs with comments and questions!
Take a look around our website and check out these great updates!
-Reading Log Resources
-Dwankhozi Hope Partnership Page
-Wish List (to be updated soon!)
-Student Websites (We will start building and creating on Wednesday! Look forward to their first big post-Published Personal Narratives)
*I'll be working on image quality. Bear with me and squint :)
Seattle News Times editor, Cheryl Phillips (aka Charlie and John's mom!) visited us to share insider secrets and tips for the real-life editing world. Our students are using editing marks like pro's now! Thank you, guest expert Cheryl! (I'm editing very carefully as I write this blog today)
This first writing unit was all about writing small moment, true personal narratives. Students began by writing many small moment stories, all the while using storytelling strategies learned during workshop minilessons.
We transformed our writing. We use to be reporters who told stories step by step. We are now storytellers who "show" rather than "tell." It has been amazing to watch students transform their writing.
We all worked on writing complete sentences and using correct capitalization, and I cowrote a specific writing goal with each student. Students then looked through their story collections and selected their best story to take all the way to publishing! We learned the difference between editing and revising and even had guest expert, Cheryl Phillips, visit to share her strategies and expertise. Our favorite strategy is the "cut open your writing" or "surgery" strategy. I'll let Charlie and Calum explain that revising method to you in the videos above :)
Students completed an editing checklist and then had a peer partner edit their writing a second time. Once done, students had the privilege of checking out a special "publishing pen" (super fancy sharpies) and selecting professional paper to handwrite their revised and edited copies. Lastly, stories were taken to the computer to practice typing, word processing, and saving to personal accounts. We learned that each step of the publishing process allows opportunity for fine tuning! We are also glad that not all writing we do needs to go through the publishing process :(
It feels great to have our first published writing of the year completed. Mr. Jeffery will be visiting tomorrow for a Weebly refresher course and then students will be uploading all three of their drafts to their websites with accompanying commentary. We look forward to sharing our first writing blogs with you and are anxious for your feedback! I'll share more about effective feedback and commenting this week.
Next Unit: Harris Burdick Mystery Fiction!
Third graders love moving away from personal stories to fiction writing :) We will be writing eerie and fantastical stories based on illustrations from the book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg. We will add to our storytelling toolkits by working on writing engaging hooks, strong storylines, and writing with incredible detail. We want our readers to have mental movies so strong they can actually feel like they are in the story! The culminating project will be for students to record themselves doing a performance reading of their mystery. This will be a chance to showcase writing and to work on reading fluency, as well!
Do some research together using the button below. It's a mysterious and awesome site. Start dreaming and scheming up ideas for a great mystery!
Rocks and Minerals
My dad, Matthew Klope (wildlife biologist) dramatically tells my class each year that "REAL SCIENCE STINKS!!!" Then attempts to cement the phrase "Science Stinks!" in their brains. He teases that his job, which frequently consists of gray whale necropsies (hence the "stink"), is "real" science :) We are planning on calling him tomorrow to let him know that Rock and Mineral science, or geology in general, passes the real science test! We used our sense of smell as one of our methods for finding properties of our samples, and discovered that our yellow sulfer chunks really reek! But, really, we have turned in to rock and mineral hounds in room 304. After studying rocks and minerals and learning to produce high-quality scientific drawings, property descriptions, and accurate identifications, we have moved on to the rock cycle. Tomorrow we will play a game that takes us on a rock cycle adventure, and ultimately ends up as a comic strip to illustrate evidence of our learning. Check out the slideshow below :)
While I work on another academic update, here are some quick announcements:
1. Scholastic Book Orders
We will submit orders online on the first working day of each month. As this is our first order, let's plan on submitting October orders by Friday the 11th. This gives you the rest of the week to book browse and place more orders!
*Click on the resources tab to find more information about Scholastic orders.
2. Reading Logs
Students are currently working on their third reading log of the year. Thank you for your support from home as we develop a strong home-reading routine. Students know that "better late than never" is our goal. If they forget to turn their reading log in on Friday, please help remind them to turn it in ASAP the next week. I will often write a quick bit of feedback on their log's, sticker them, and pass back out the same day they are turned in. Last Friday I sent home all reviewed logs in orange folders so that you can review them as a family. I keep a record of reading logs and the rubric scores earned on each and use this as a goal setting tool with kids. A copy of the reading log will be uploaded to the website tomorrow for any at-home printing emergencies-look to the resources tab :)
3. Scheduling Tool
Our classroom coordinator, Holley Ring, has brought a great new online tool to my attention! I will be working with it at home tonight in hopes of having our Fall Conference and Parent Volunteer Schedules digitized! More info to come :)
We are transitioning to our second reading and writing unit of the year-I'm excited to share all the details with you this week. Student Weebly Websites are in the works and will soon house their most recent published narratives! Get ready for viewing and commenting-our class has been working hard and will have much to share!