Friday, December 3, 2010

What We've Been Learning ....

In Reader's Workshop we have been learning about character traits, or adjectives that describe the characters in our story. We've really been trying to find evidence, or proof in the story for each trait. We also have learned about SCHEMA and how we all have different schemas. We use our schema everyday to help us understand the world around us. Our schema is what we already know (our background knowledge). Our schema comes from what we eat, smell, taste, feel, hear, see, and experience. Our schema is what we store in our brains & we add to it each time we visit a new place, read a new book, and experience different things.

In Writer's Workshop we have been working on improving our personal narratives. We tried a new strategy this week to help us think of a fantastic small moment story that others would enjoy. We practice thinking of FIRST TIMES that we did things or visited places, or saw someone. Our 'first time' small moment stories were memorable and fun to share with each other.

In Math we have been working on our addition and subtraction with regrouping. We also have been reviewing place value. We are excited to be starting a new unit all about Area.

In Social Studies we just finished up learning about landforms. We will soon start learning about where famous landforms are in our country. It has been exciting receiving postcards for our Postcard Exchange Project & finding where each postcard came from on our map of the U.S.A. We have been singing and practicing the 50 States Song to help us learn the names of the 50 states! Anyone who memorizes it by December 16th will be invited for McDonald's Lunch Bunch with Mrs. Kartsimas!!!!

Our class is working HARD towards our classroom goal of reading/passing 500 A.R. quizzes! As of today, we have passed 487 quizzes! We are SO CLOSE. This week we all worked on creating an individual A.R. goal and a date we want to reach it by. Keep up the great work!!!!

Remember to log-on to IXL at home each night & on the weekends to practice your math skills and unlock those prizes!

Speedy will be going home with Dominic this weekend! :)
Enjoy the snow that's coming on Saturday.....

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Sunday, October 24, 2010

A Peek At Our Week......

This week, we finished up Unit 2 of Math Trailblazers by exploring subtraction facts and testing how quickly we could figure the differences to our subtraction flash cards. In Writer's Workshop, we have been working on beginning our stories with a strong lead, or first sentence. We looked at some texts from our classroom libraries and saw how authors' leads were in different forms: dialogue, action, a question, or a description of the setting. We practiced starting our personal narratives with strong leads this week. We will be publishing one of our favorite seed stories next week. In Reader's Workshop we've been exploring nouns, verbs, and adjectives and making meaningful connections to what we read. In Social Studies, we learned all about maps & about our continent, country, state and city. We all took a quiz on Friday to test our knowledge of our home address & phone number. This Thursday was our FIRST collaboration time with our 'online' buddies. Our classroom will be working with another 3rd grade classroom in Mount Prospect, IL. We will collaborate using technology throughout the year. This experience teaches us that two classrooms, from different buildings and different school districts can come together to collaborate! This year we will 'knock down the walls of our classrooms' to take learning and sharing to a whole new level! Check back often to see what we're up to! On Thursday we had our first Skype video conference call where we met our online buddies. Then, we broke up into 6 groups and used Google Chat to get to know our buddies even more! It was a blast!

Remember: We are going on a field trip to Sonny Acres' Pumpkin Patch on Wednesday! If you have not turned in your permission slip & $6, please turn it in ASAP Also, the Kennedy Carnival is on Thursday night! Remember, you may buy wristbands before the event for $10! Only children need wristbands, not adults! But children MUST be accompanied by an adult!

Friday, October 1, 2010

The Beginning of a New Year.....

Parents & Families.....be sure to check out blog to see what we've been learning about in Room 203!
Here is our weekly newsletter (written collectively by the students):


In Social Studies, we are learning about communities. We learned about and compared 3 types of communities: Urban, Suburban, and Rural. We used a Venn Diagram to compare them. This week we read a book called City Mouse Country Mouse and we wrote about if we wanted to live in the city or the country.

In Math we did our first TIMS Lab lesson called Kind of Beans. We learned that the population is a whole group, and a sample is just a small part of the population. We have been practicing our addition facts.

In Reader’s Workshop, we’ve set up comfortable book nooks in our classroom & we read in them everyday. We learned about finding ‘just-right’ books to read during Reader’s Workshop. To see if it’s a just right book, we use the 5-finger test!

In Writer’s Workshop we are writing personal narratives or true stories! We learned some strategies to help us get started writing. We can think about a person who is special to us, or a place that is special to us & write about a small moment we shared with that person or at that place.

In P.E. we are doing fitness testing. It has been very tiring!

Kennedy Singers, our after-school chorus with Mrs. Kesler started this week. Kennedy Singers will meet every Thursday. We are going to have a concert in 5 weeks for our families!

This week we took our MAP tests and today we start going down to the Reading Room!

This weekend, Speedy will be going home with Joshua. Have a great weekend! ☺

Friday, March 12, 2010

It's Been Awhile.......

We have been very busy learning & having fun in Room 203! We've been preparing for our ISAT test that we just finished! We are happy that it's over & we know we did GREAT! Sorry we have posted in a long time. We will try to write our newsletter every Friday from now on!

Time to fill you in on things we've been learning about:

In Music, we are working on "Poetry In Motion". We just performed last night for our families. Our class learned the poem Gregory Griggs. Mrs. Kesler taught us how to play the rhythm of the poem on instruments. We each had different parts: first to say the poem (Gregory Griggs, East/West, We love his wigs).

In Math we are working on multiplication. We are taking timed quizzes on our facts. We just learned how to do double and triple digit multiplication! We are working hard to get ready for 4th grade. Every Tuesday afternoon we had flex math groups. This is when we go to another classroom to learn something new about math. Topics we learned about so far have been: area, fractions, perimeter, shapes, multiplication, 3D shapes, and measurement. In our classroom we've learned a lot, too. We made fraction families (pictures of our families and fractions that described them) and learned a song about lines, rays, and angles. We made 3D shapes using marshmallows & toothpicks. We counted the number of edges, faces, and vertices. To learn about capacity (how much liquid fits into a container) we made the Gallon Man. We've been busy with Math!

In Art we are selling our artwork to raise money for the school. The Art Fair will be on Thursday, April 22nd. Students AND parents can donate their artwork to be sold! PARENTS: Please think about creating a piece of artwork to sell at the art fair. In Art, we studied about Walt Disney. We practiced drawing Mickey Mouse. It was easy when Ms. Dougal taught us step-by-step how to draw him. We have also been learning about Abstracts, which are art pieces that have pictures that are not real (shapes/lines) and you can't really tell what it is (you're not supposed to know).

In Writer's Workshop we have been working on writing Essays! We organize our thoughts using boxes & bullets. Each bullet becomes its own paragraph with lots of details. We have written essays on: our favorite holiday, something that's important to us, our best friend, our favorite animal, and our favorite season. Each essay has 5 paragraphs. We are also remembering to indent each paragraph, and to capitalize the beginning of each sentence.

In P.E. we are doing Fitness Week. We are practicing kicking balls. We practice running from one side of the gym to the other.

In Science we have been learning about the Human Body. The systems of the human body are: muscular, circulatory, skeletal, digestive, nervous, and respiratory system. Some of the important words we've learned about: lungs, heart, skeleton, skull, ribcage, esophagus, small intestine, large intestine, stomach, brain, spinal cord, and nerves. We will be finishing the Human Body Theme today & moving on to our Water Theme next week!

Don't forget.....Spring Break is coming up! March 26th is our last day of school before Spring Break.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Weekly News

in Writer's Workshop we are working on Essays. There are 5 paragraphs in our essays and we are working on adding details to support our thesis. In Reader's Workshop we are working on finding common nouns and proper nouns. In Math, we are starting multiplication. Multiplication is an easier way to add. We did Math hoppers where we hopped on a number line to find the answer to multiplication number sentences. On Tuesday afternoon, we had flexible Math Groups where we all learned about Multiplication. On Thursday afternoon, we had flexible reading groups. We stayed in our classroom to learn about genres & Author's Purpose. Our Science Unit is exploring and learning about the Human Body. We used a website this week with Ms. Parkhill to learn about the Skeletal System. In P.E. we had free days this week. In Art, Ms. Dougal is teaching us about Paul Cezanne. We will be going on a field trip to the Chicago Art Institute later this month. Speedy is going home with Mateusz this weekend! Happy Birthday to Cassidy (on Saturday). Have a good weekend!

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Room 203 News....

We have been busy learning this week! In Math we have been working on area. On Tuesday we started Flexible Math Groups. We traveled to other 3rd grade teacher’s classrooms to learn about Area. In Music we are watching a movie called Music Man. In P.E. we are practicing chasing and fleeing. In Writer’s Workshop we are working on Essays. We are living with our eyes open and noticing and observing things that might spark an idea to write an essay about. In Social Studies we are becoming experts on the Southeast region. We finished up our regions project by learning the different landforms, the climate, the natural resources, and we learned all about the states in the Southeast region. We wrote out scripts & will be recording our movie to teach the other 3rd grade classes about the Southeast. We started our Great State Reports! Each of us are studying a state in the Southeast regions and learning all about it! Our Word Wall words the past two weeks have had prefixes and suffixes. We learned an awesome song about where prefixes go (at the beginning of a word, UP FRONT) and how they change the meaning of a word. In Reader’s Workshop we have been working on questioning. Good readers always ask questions, so we have been working on finding the answers to the 5 big questions: WHO is the main character?, WHAT is the problem?, WHY is it a problem?, WHEN/WHERE did the story take place?, HOW is the problem solved?

We started working with our 3rd grade ONLINE buddies who go to school in Mount Prospect, Il. We started by emailing them some questions & we are writing a winter story together using Google Docs.

Speedy is going home with Natalie this weekend! Don’t forget…next Friday is Polar Express Day! Remember to wear your pajamas!