Valentine's Day Week!

This week was super busy!

We worked on idioms in skills block. The kiddos thought this was super funny! Figurative language can  be tricky, but not for my smart cookies! To practice, I gave pairs of students an idiom. Each pair had to think of the literal meaning, draw a picture, and then write the figurative meaning. They just couldn't get enough of this! Take a look:

 

In reading we are working on text structure. This can be super tricky.  Here is a chart we used to distinguish the different types:

We will be continuing with this again this week. Students should be able to read any piece of text and decide which text structure the author chose to show his/her information.

We also had a lot of Valentine's Day fun! We created love comics in the morning, did fraction conversation hearts in math, created fun owl Valentine bags, exchanged Valentines, had a heart stacking contest, decorated cupcakes, and made heart weavings! Phew, what a busy and memorable day!

This week's recap!

Even though there was only four days, we had a busy week!

In math we are learning to tell time to the minute and work through elapsed time word problems. We have a helper we call "Judy." This clock has become an old friend and the kids love when she comes out!

 We also did a fun scavenger hunt round the room practicing different elapsed time problems. They had to find all the numbers and then solve the problems. This was an awesome way to get the kiddos walking around and doing math at the same time!

  In reader's workshop, we were all moody! We learned how authors can create images and descriptive writing to create a mood for the reader. We used our learning scale to gauge where we are are and where we want to get to. Check it out:

 Then, we took a boring sentence and jazzed it up according to different moods. The kids did a fantastic job coming up with descriptive words!

To finish out our mood study, the students worked in pairs to read stories, find words that made them feel a certain way, and then color a mood ring according to the mood of the text. They had such a blast with this project and did a wonderful job! Here is the finished product:

We had a special birthday this week! He turned double digits and brought us some yummy cupcakes to celebrate!

 In skills block, we studied analogies and multiple meaning words. For multiple meaning words, we created "M&M's" with words and wrote a sentence using each meaning. We then of course ate M&Ms to celebrate our knowledge of multiple meaning words!

We had a great week and can't wait until Monday!

Playing Catch Up!

Yay! We are back and kicking on our blog! Happy 2014 from the Rock Stars!

The first few weeks of 2014 have been awesome! We hit our 100th Day on Thursday! Can you believe it? We celebrated by making 100th day hats, eating a 100 snack, doing 100 exercises, flipping a coin and graphing it 100 times, writing about what we would do with 100 dollars, conducting an experiment with 100 chews of a Starburst, and making 100 gumball art! We had a blast!

In reading we have been working on theme. This can be kind of tricky, but we have had perseverance and have gotten really good at it! We practiced using fables, tall tales, and even Disney movies!

In math we finished up fractions, had a quick unit on measurement, and now we are moving to time. Students should know how to tell time to the minute and solve elapsed time problems.  We will be working on that more this week.

I science we have been all about matter. We conducted experiments on how to find volume and mass. We loved getting those graduated cylinders!

We just finished our latest read aloud, "The Wizard of Oz." The kids loved hearing the differences between the novel and the movie. A lot of unexpected twists and turns!

We also are right in the middle of our class book "President of the Whole Fifth Grade." We chose this book because we are about to begin our government study in social studies! With a background in elections, the government study will come easy!

Happy 2014 and stay tuned for more insight into the lives of your third graders!