What a Great Day!

And they are back!  I don't know what happened Monday, but MY class showed back up today.  They were well behaved, asking and answering questions... this was the third grade class that makes me excited to be their teacher!!!

• 1st and 2nd Period - Literacy Block
• Today we started with our favorite way to learn new words - WORD LADDERS!  The kids had to read clues to figure out how to manipulate words to make new ones.  They love doing it and at the end of the session, we have 10 new words and definitions we can use in our reading and writing.  After that we passed out our new nonfiction text "Let's Classify Organisms". This book is a level Q so we discussed the importance of participation and paying attention during read aloud.  We also talked about how important it was to ask questions to make sure they understand the tasks and text.
• Our focus today stayed with understanding out text structure helps with understanding.  We did what good readers do and examined the parts of the book before we started reading:  Cover, back, Table of Contents, etc...  We discussed our ideas of what we would be learning and what we were looking forward to learning. Then I read pages 4-9 to start our study.  We stopped and did table discussions along the way, making sure that everyone was involved and understood what we were doing.  I did an acting skit where I pulled people up and we had to figure out how I grouped them.. how I classified each group.  They really seemed to understand the concept after finishing.  
• We finally moved to the writing process and the first part is planning.   We discussed what the Performance Based Assessment was asking them to do.  They will have to do research on a living thing and write a news article about them.  We have practiced all the skills, so I gave the the top 10 list of endangered animals, and as a group we narrowed it to our most interesting 5.  I will allow them to pick one of those five animals to do their study on.  The finalist were: leopard, lemur, gorilla, sea turtle, and the tiger.  I will let them sign up for their group and I will give them kid friendly articles for them to read and take notes from.  

• 3rd - Math 
• Today we did more number talks seeing how much they could pull in from yesterday.  We are still working on mental subtraction, so they are slowly getting more ways to do numbers in their heads.   Finally we moved to the problem of the day, also with subtraction.  They are slowly getting better at the process, but still having trouble slowing down, reading, and understanding word problems.  (READ MORE!!)  We looked at the interactive lesson GoMath! 4.5 on multiplying by 7.  We were just starting the independent practice when we had to go to the American Jazz performance in the auditorium.
• 4th - Jazz Concert
• LET ME TELL YOU!!! My little ones can DANCE!  Mr. McDougall started it off by pulling little Ms. Chantal up to dance.. .and before I knew it...  all the kids were up and dancing.  I can't wait to download the pictures and video from the phone and post them.  SO MUCH FUN! 
• 5th - Lunch
• 6th - Science with Ms. Galan
• 7th - Math Wrap Up
• We had to finish the math lesson, then we read some more of our class novel "Emma on the Air!"

Homework:

• Math:  Lesson 4.5 Homework Practice pp. 219-220
• Math:  Working with Distributive Property Handout
• Spelling:  Practice Sheet
• Reading:  Finish IR book and take AR test on Thursday

Pictures from today's concert to come!!