Pictures from the Zoo!

3rd graders went to the Brookfield Zoo today! Check out the pictures below:

Dinosaur Fair Tonight!

Please come to our Dinosaur Fair tonight from 6:30-7:30pm. The 3rd graders worked extremely hard on their dinosaur projects & are excited to show you their work! Check out some of the projects:

A Peek At Our Week

In Science this week we’ve been learning about dinosaurs. We learned that paleontologists excavate fossils. There are 5 different types of fossils (eggs, bones, teeth, skin imprints, and footprints). This week we made our own imitation fossils using seashells. We practiced excavating fake fossils (aka chocolate chips) from a cookie using toothpicks. It is very hard work, and we learned that paleontologists must be very careful when digging for fossils. This week we picked our dinosaur for the dinosaur fair project. Each of us will study our own dinosaur and become experts. We will write a dinosaur report and make a science fair board for the Dinosaur Fair on Thursday, May 28^th. Each of us will also create a visual project at home.  In P.E. we are doing fitness testing. Reading Room is finished and now the reading room teachers are testing all the 3^rd grade students to see how much we’ve grown. This week we added fish to our aquarium. Bubbles is our class goldfish, and Gary is our snail (who moves incredibly fast)! Wednesday was job juggling day. Miss Lisinski, who teaches 1^st grade was our teacher, and Miss Gosche taught 1^st grade for the day! In Writer’s Workshop we are working on writing essays about characters from the text. We read Streganona and took a close look at Big Anthony’s character. In Reader’s Workshop we read Mr. George Baker and worked more on making inferences. Julia will be taking Speedy home this weekend! REMINDER: Auditions for the talent show will be next week on Monday! In Math this week we learned DOUBLE DIGIT multiplication! We are really going to WOW our 4^th grade teachers! We are finishing up our Young Author Books because Young Author Night is next Thursday, May 21^st!!!! We hope to see LOTS of families that night . Our books are AMAZING and we can’t wait to share them! As we finish our Young Author illustrations, Miss Gosche is helping us record our books and we will create an iMovie. 

New Tool

Last Friday we started one of our Mother's Day gifts for the special lady in our lives. We used Wordle (www.wordle.net) which is a great, free tool!~ According to their website, "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide." The words that appear more frequently in the text, show up bigger in the word cloud. Students then customized their word cloud with different fonts, layouts, and colors. We printed them out and are turning them into some awesome hanging pictures, but you can also save them to the Wordle gallery to share with

your friends. Check out some of ours below:

This Week.....

This week we saw the 4th and 5th graders perform a multicultural show. In P.E. we are learning about baseball and softball. In Art we worked on our illustrations for our Young Author Books. In Science we are finishing up learning about the water cycle. Condensation is when the gas changes back to a liquid and becomes a cloud. We learned about the different cloud types, and had cloud stations. We painted clouds, used shaving cream to make clouds and mixed shaving cream and glue to make a 3D cloud. We learned the Water Cycle Song with Miss McSorley’s class. Next Friday the 3rd graders will share this song & everything we learned about the water cycle with the whole school at the Spirit Assembly. To show what we know about the water cycle, we made pictures using SumoPaint. In Writer’s Workshop we are working on literary essays and trying to jump into the story. Wednesday night was Bug Bonanza! The Peggy Notebaert Museum brought spiders, grasshoppers, centipedes, and cockroaches for the kids to see. Classrooms were open with fun activities for families. We found out that on Donors Choose, our Aquarium Project was fully funded! We can’t wait to get a fish tank for our classroom! Pictures coming soon! Does anyone have any ideas for names for our fish? Siyana is taking Speedy home this weekend. We took our Cycle 5 Math and Reading tests this week. Check out pictures below from our Cloud Centers! Learning is messy.......