Just Before the Holiday
Hey Guys just a quick note in the week before the Winter Break,
Holiday Treats
For the past couple of years I have done Root Beer( also orange and cheery 7-up) Floats for my treat going into winter break. Lachlan also jinxed me a couple of weeks ago and so it is a perfect time for me to give him that soda I owe him. If you do not want me to do this, let me know. If your kiddo has any dietary needs that would interfere with this let me know and we can work something out.
We have a field trip scheduled
Oh Man! I usually wait until the final 1/3 of the school year to do this but I have indeed scheduled a field trip in February, the 25th to be exact, to go visit Mercy Corps. They will be talking with us about the experiences of immigrants from all over the world. We will be riding the Max so no drivers needed, just people to accompany us. I will post again in January with all the details and you can volunteer. I just wanted to give you a heads up.
Science
Matt will be working on math machines in science. They will bring them home on Tuesday. He would love to have some help in the assembly of these machines. Science starts at 1:20 if you can make it we would really appreciate it.
They are a really cool and fun way to practice their multiplication facts. It is hard to describe in an email, but they are cool and fun “magic” machines that you try and beat. Look for those coming home and it will give them something to do over the break.
Happy Thanksgiving – Please Keep Cereal Boxes Coming
Hello All,
I hope you guys are having a great Thanksgiving break. I have made the trip out to my home town of Ione and I am fighting the slow internet to be able to post.
Hour of Code
pWe are going to be participating in The Hour of Code not the first week that we get back but the week after. Thanks to Dave Hardy for passing this along. I had never heard of it and I was totally scared of teaching anything to do with coding due to my 2 liberal arts degrees. But this has shown me that coding is for everyone and we can do it. Also recently a list of intern salaries for coders was posted online and I nearly had a heart attack, seriously, Google it. It should be really fun.
Math
We have officially gone and done it. We have moved onto multiplication. It is the official math skill of 3rd grade. It is fun to get moving on a totally new skill, well not totally new because we are studying multiplication as an extension of addition. Specifically we are calling it REPEATED ADDITION. It is the fancy buzzword that we are all using these days.
Writing
I got an email on Wednesday that our books should be delivered next week. We are very excited to have them in hand.
Storyline
We are still looking for a few more cereal boxes for suitcases. Just send them on in. We can’t have too many. They will use them for other things if we get an overflow of boxes.
Thanks and have a happy Thanksgiving.
Part 2
We got our published monster books this week, and they are amazing. If you missed ordering one or you want to order another click here The PIN number is 5058607.
Just an FYI we have found some hypodermic needles in our garden and on our playground. We have talked as a class about not playing in the leaves and what to do if we see one.
Volunteers
After the break we will be starting our novel groups. We need adults who want to be leaders of these groups. It’s like your book club except really fun. 😉 The day of the week is up to you but the time has to be after lunch. Let me know if you want to volunteer.
November! We need cereal boxes!
Hello,
I hope you guys are enjoying the long weekend we have! I have filled it catching up on all the cleaning needing to be done at my house. Exciting life I lead, I know.
Storyline
We have finally started our new Storyline The Arrival. I showed most of you the book over conferences and we jumped right in last week. We are thinking about the things that are most valuable to us, the personality traits of people who leave their homes for good and the courage it must take to do so. We are creating items to pack in suit cases but we don’t have enough suit cases yet. If you have any extra cereal boxes laying around please send them in.
Math
We are spending some extra time right now on place value and 3 digit addition and subtraction. I just looked over some 3 digit addition assessments and wowzers they are doing really great. I was really impressed. 3 digit subtraction is going to take more time of course. The borrowing and then borrowing when there is a zero, its complicated, but we will practice and we will get it. We have been dabbling a bit in multiplication and we will start in earnest in the next couple of weeks.
Writing
Last Friday I mailed off our Monster Book stuff and we are now officially published authors. I don’t know exactly when the books will arrive but I think they will arrive fairly soon, hopefully before we take off for Thanksgiving!
Have a good rest of your weekend and send in those cereal boxes.
Allison
Hey All!
Just a quick note for the 3rd week of October
The Quality Education Fair
This Sunday is the Quality Education Fair at Pioneer Square. I think the weather will cooperate and it is going to be a great day. I have been told there will be booths with games and bubbles as well as performances by PPS kiddos. It will be a great day for the family. The more people who show up the larger the message will be. We think of our students as people not data mines and test scores. It is from 12:00 to 3:00. I hope to see you there.
Math Tutoring Flyer
I sent home a Math tutoring program flyer with everyone this week. I know there was some confusion about whether or not I chose to only send them with specific students. Truth is everyone got a flyer for it. It’s not really remedial math either. It is more of a chance to get more practice with math skills they already have a pretty clear grasp on. There is never enough time in a day to practice everything during the school day.
Conferences
I have most everyone signed up for conferences, but if you are one of the few who haven’t yet signed up please do it ASAP. If you are one of the many who misplaced that scrap piece of paper that you wrote down the conference schedule on. Feel free to check it HERE at any time. Also if you want to change to an open slot I will have no problem with that. Remember that Thursday is located on sheet 2 and you can change that in the bottom left corner.
Have a great weekend
Allison
Happy October
Hey All,
October is a great month and I only wish the weather would cooperate. I am a sun lover but I am ready for the fall weather.
Math
We just finished up Unit 1 and we are moving onto bigger and better things. We will be looking at numbers and something called minimal collections. Which essentially has us looking at numbers and the groupings of numbers. Which of course leads us to (duh da da duh) carrying and borrowing in the traditional algorithm. We will be learning to add and subtract larger numbers and we will need some more efficient ways to add and subtract than tally marks. We also have started looking at multiplication as repeated addition. I am not going to link the home connection website for Unit two. The reason is that we have changed Unit 2 so much that I don’t think it would match up with their learning. It used to be mostly about the base 4 and base 5 counting systems. It is confusing so I will link the next unit to the bridges website.
Writing
We are currently working on our Monster writing piece. This is a tough task for many of our writers because we are working in paragraphs. These paragraphs all have different requirements and they have to do all of these things while telling a story. They are doing a great job so far. They each have an outline of the story, an illustration and a rough draft of an intro paragraph. We will be finished with these stories by October 28th. The reason we will be finished is because the stories will all be published. I have to hand them in by Halloween in order to get them back by the 7th. You will have the opportunity to purchase one of the books if you would like one. They are very cool.
Quality Education Fair
Here is the flyer for the Quality Education Fair Hopefully it is a really nice day and you can go down to Pioneer Square to see what is going on. It is a great way to show Portland that we care more about our kids than their test scores.
Volunteering
Hey guys, if you are interested in coming into the classroom and volunteering I am looking for people to come in during Math worktime. I do it everyday, except Wednesdays, from 9:00 to 10:30. So right after drop off. I work with small groups of students and the rest of the class is busy working on their other jobs. I need someone to help keep the others focused on their tasks and purpose. If you would like to do this let me know.
Have a great week!
October Already (Conference Sign ups)
Hello,
I can’t believe it is October already. It seems like we just got here. But as usual things are moving right along. Just a quick check in
Writing
Before we start our new Storyline for the fall and the winter we are spending time just on a writing project. I call it our monster writing. They are spending this entire month writing a story with a central monster character. They also are learning all about paragraphs, how to make them, why they should make them and how them should look when they are done. We have just introduced the concept of indenting and that is always the toughest part for third graders to grasp. We will share our monster stories with each other on the 28th of October and then it will be turned into a book for our Library.
Math
We are finishing up our unit one which is mostly just review of 2nd grade. We are practicing our addition and subtraction strategies to make them more efficient and make us faster mathematicians. But of course time marches on so quickly and we will be taking a look at fractions, money, two digit addition and subtraction, number lines and the very beginnings of multiplication through arrays.
Conferences
Here is the link for conference sign ups. You can look to check your time or of course sign up if you haven’t signed up yet. Keep in mind that Friday is on sheet 2 of the signup. The bottom left hand corner will allow you to go back and forth between days. I am also trusting you not to delete people so you can sign up in their slot. I am certain I have nothing to worry about in that department. If you do accidentally delete something you shouldn’t let me know and we will try and sort it out.
If later on you need/want to check the sign up sheet you can just search for conference sign up and it should bring up this page.
Quality Education Fair
On Sunday October 19th in Pioneer Courthouse Square is the Quality Education Fair. It is going to be a great event that is not about test scores but about the quality of education we are giving to Oregon students. There will be some great information about holding our state accountable for their promises to our students. This will be a fun family event and we can show people what is important to us.
One last note
Check out my scholastic post just before this one. It explains how to order book. If you guys order books using this we get points to order books for our classroom library. Diary of a WImpy kid is coming out next month and they will get it delivered on release date.
Scholastic Book Club
Hey all,
I have a class account through Scholastic and if you order using my class code we will get free books for the classroom. Sporadically they will receive the little newspaper with books in it, but you can order books through it any time. If you are interested then follow the directions below.
If This Is Your First Time Ordering Online:
– VISIT scholastic.com/readingclub
– ENTER the one-time Class Activation Code JDFBC
– SHOP from a carefully curated selection of the best books, value packs, and Storia eBooks
– SUBMIT your order and earn FREE Books for our classroom
– All book orders will be shipped to our classroom so we can celebrate the joy of reading together!
Week 3
Hello Families,
A quick note for this week
The loss of our Para-Educator Karen
You have received a CSS Boom about this but it is so important that you are informed of this development. The Special Education department has determined that we are over staffed (crazy) and they will be taking one of our Paras on Wednesday. Karen is so important to our school community and she is able to serve younger students so that our other Para, Kathy, is able to serve our older students. Her assistance is imperative to a positive classroom community. Even if your student is not directly served by a para-educator they indirectly benefit from their presence. We have decided as a community to email the people making this decision so that they may understand how devastating this would be to our school. Please take a moment to send an email to those people so they know how many voices oppose this decision. This is truly a crisis at our school. We would love for their inboxes to be full on Monday morning.
Go ahead and copy this text into your email and send it to the folks below:
carolesmith@pps.net
mpearson@pps.net
bregan@pps.net
pknowles@pps.net
radkins@pps.net
mmorton@pps.net
sbuel@pps.net
tkoehler@pps.net
gbelisle@pps.net
PIcture Day
Also you should know that picture day is Wednesday, September 24th. We are scheduled for the end of the day, so if your kiddo is anything like me when I was 8, you may want to send them with the shirt you want them to wear in their backpack and they can change just before the pictures. Although my third grade pic with the spaghetti stain on it is kind of cute. I am also told we will do them outside. So that is kind of exciting.
Also you will never get an envelope. In 2 or 3 weeks they will come home with proofs and then you can order them online, if you like them. I’m sure at some point there will be retakes but I have not heard about that yet.
Have a good week!
Week 3 Here We Go
Greetings from Room 25!
We had a great 2nd week. We managed to not melt in the heat, I keep telling myself I am going to miss this weather in a couple of months. Here are a few things that we are working on.
Storyline:
While our school wide focus is not technically a Storyline I still like to call it that because it takes the place of our Storyline time and it has such a wonderful connotation in our students mind. We are working on and thinking about becoming Critical Thinkers. In the next couple of weeks we will spend time defining the 5 tenants of Critical Thinking, thinking about what it looks like when we are thinking critically and what happens when we don’t think critically. We are using Starry Messenger, a picture book about Galileo, to help us think through Critical Thinking. At Back to School night on the 25th you will be able to see the start of our work this year. We have looked at some videos about how the bravery of Galileo to challenge assumptions has lead to so many cool discoveries today. If your family would like to, you can check out OMSI’s Star Parties . They allow people to look through a telescope at the very same sky as Galileo did over 300 years ago. I have been in the past and they are so fun!
Math:
Right now in math we are working on solidifying their addition and subtraction skills so that we can move on to the coolest part of 3rd grade (in my humble opinion) Multiplication! We are working hard on strategies to make addition and subtraction easy and quick. We are playing games, focusing on specific strategies and building good math habits for the future. If you are interested, you can check out Bridges family support at the Math Learning Center. It lets you know what is happening and allows you to see what we are doing in the classroom. There are specific pages called home connections and you can play games or just read explanations of what we are working on in class. We are currently in Unit One, but we will soon move onto Unit 2 and I will post the connection again when we move onto a new unit of study. One disclaimer that I want to write is that we don’t follow bridges exactly as it was written. We have been doing it for 4 years now and we have really focused our instruction on what we think is the most important, there is not enough time in 2 years to cover every single thing. That being said it’s all good stuff and it comes with directions so if your kiddo is like, I have never seen this before in my life, you can read together and know how to do it.
Lice Prevention
As you may have heard the year is just beginning and we have already had cases of lice in the 3rd grade. It is so important that you check your student and be diligent so we can wipe this out and not have to deal with it later in the year. We will have the school nurse, Cyndi, come to our class on Thursday to discuss the do’s and don’t of lice prevention. We definitely need more hooks on our closet doors so that people have room for their backpacks and room to put their coats inside their backpacks. If you, or someone you know, is handy with a drill let me know and I will get the hooks if you will put them up on our closet doors.
Unfortunately, the chemical treatments for lice are ineffective and really the only way to get rid of the little buggers is to comb them out. I know last year families used the service Lice to Know You and were very happy with their results. This is a frustrating problem for families to have and the disruption to your family life is…well I can’t think of a better word than sucky. But if we are all diligent we can have this be a problem of the past. Is your head itching yet?
In spite of my last post, I hope you have a great weekend and a lovely week 3
Allison
CSS 3rd Grade 