Interactive Science & SC History Notebooks

I am trying something new this year that a colleage of mine shared with me. I realize that coming into 3rd grade there are so many standards involved with Science and SC History. Your child will learn A LOT of standards this year between both subject areas, and to make learning these facts more fun, we are implementing these notebooks in class. The students have finished decorating and have already starting adding pages to their notebooks. As we do them together in class, we add each one to the Table of Contents page. These should be coming home to help your child with studying this information as well. Please help remind your child to take care of their notebooks when transporting them to and from school. It would be a shame to lose them after all their hard work. Thanks and happy studying! ;)

A Look at KITE-ll

The students have been enjoying their KITE-ll video lessons and have some showing off to do of one of the songs they've learned so far. This week we focused on some landform vocabulary words. See if your child can sing the "Buenos dias" song or the new song shown on this video "Barco chiquitito" to you at home. :)

SC Regions Cookies

Hopefully your child did not come home sugar-crazed this past Thursday. Please know if they did it was for a good cause. :) We made regions cookies together in class by adding ingredients to represent each region on our state cookie. Hopefully this fun and hands-on experience will help the students remember the location of the regions and important facts about each one.

Reading Salad - Metacognition & Schema

Sometimes we all have to see it to believe it! Kids aren't any different. The Reading Salad experience allows children to create a mental picture in their thead they soon won't forget. It's also helpful by providing a graphic picture of metacognition to help reinvorce what they've experienced. We've all had thoughts, feelings, and life experiences that builds our schema (background knowledge). We used a lint roller to demonstrate how we pick up experiences throughout our lives. I want students using that schema when they read. We all learn in different ways. Some people can simply hear something while others have to experience it. I am a very visual learner and like to see words and information arranged in graphic organizers. We used a real salad bowl and green and red cards to represent text and thinking (lettuce and tomatoes). :) As I modeled real reading (thinking about what I just read) we would add our salad ingredients. By the end of our reading, our salad should have more lettuce than ingredients or our reading should have more thinking than text. :) We we "think about their thinking we are using Metacognition. We also used a thought bubble to help support being Metacognitive. Using it allowed us to demonstrate how proficient readers think while they are reading...basically listening to that little voice inside our heads. No, we aren't crazy...LOL!!! We are using our conversational voice to merge our text with our thinking. The students really enjoyed this lesson, and hopefully by modeling this process they understand the importance of these concepts.

Car Push Lab

We have been learning about Forces and Motion and the students really enjoyed our "Car Push" lab. Students set up a ramp and release a ball near the top so that it rolls down the ramp. They are able to feel the force (push) when the ball hits their hands. This procedure is repeated for the other two balls. It's easy to feel that the golf ball pushes harder on the hand than the table tennis ball. Students learned that there is a relationship between the strength of a push (force) acting on a toy car, the mass of the ball, and the motion of the car.

Rolling Reader

We are so excited to have Mrs. Beck be our Rolling Reader this year. She will be coming in on Fridays to read to us. :)

Football Donuts

The students have been working so hard lately and been tested so much through MAP, Benchmarking, and Dominie so I felt like they deserved a reward! We are nearing the end of our first full month of school and the football season has officially kicked off!

Grandparents Breakfast

We had such a great turn out this week, and as always it's great to see all the proud grandparents, parents, and other loved ones come to visit!