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.......

In Science we are learning about the Water Cycle. We learned that water comes in 3 different forms: liquid, solid, and gas. We learned that the Earth is 75% water and only 1% is drinkable! We brainstormed ways we can conserve water. Water evaporates, or changes from a liquid to a gas, when it is heated. When it rained this week, we traced the outline of puddles and saw the next day that the water had evaporated. We also painted using colored salt water. The water evaporated leaving the colorful salt pictures. We are also doing experiments. We put celery in 3 different cups. One with red water, one with plain water, and one with no water to see the changes that happen. We know water can be found in oceans, lakes, rivers, seas, in the soil, and in all living things. In Reader’s Workshop we worked on making inferences. We used animal pictures on the National Geographic for Kids website to infer what the characters were thinking. To inference means to figure out what the author means, because authors don’t always tell us everything. To practice making inferences, we used bumper stickers to figure out what they mean, who would put it on their car, and why they would want to put it on their car. Wednesday was Earth Day, and we read Michael Recycle. We talked about ways we can take care of our Earth. In Math we’ve been practicing 2 and 3 digit times 1 digit multiplication! We are getting ready for 4th grade! In Reading Room we have been working on our Young Author’s Books. On Thursday we went to see Disney Nature’s EARTH movie. We learned about different animals in different parts of our world.Today we got our caterpillars. We will watch them go through the life cycle and turn into a butterfly. Today we also have a Survivor Game Show Assembly. Daniela will be taking Speedy home this weekend!t was awesome! In cursive this week we learned the letters y, v, and z. On Monday, we had a special treat. Miss Houf, who used to teach 3rd grade at Kennedy, came from the Peggy Notebaert Children’s Nature Museum, and brought insects with her! She brought walking sticks, crickets, hissing cockroaches, and a giant grasshopper. To teach the different body parts of an insect, she dressed up Miss Gosche! Check out our slideshow below! Rickie was our photographer for the day!

News for April 8th-10th

We had a VERY short week…only 3 days! This week in the Reading Room, we started Young Authors. We each will be writing our own story. First we come up with our ideas, then write a sloppy copy of our story, then the teacher checks it, and we publish! We even draw our own illustrations. In Math we worked with tangrams. We made different puzzles in the shapes of things like a giraffe, a horse, a cat, and a duck. We made our own pictures using tans, too! This week we officially got rid of our regular chairs. We now sit on exercise balls all day long! It’s cool. In Science we are finishing our Human Body Theme and learning about the food pyramid and nutrition. Today we are having a healthy food party. We have a field trip coming up on Thursday, April 23rd. To celebrate Earth Day (a day late) we are going to the movie theater to see Disney’s new movie, Earth. This week on Tasty Thursday we tried asparagus, and today for Fruity Friday we are having strawberries! Speedy will even have some because he LOVES strawberries! This week on Thursday we had a Spirit Assembly and Daniela won the Caring Award for our class. Today we have another assembly. A planetarium is coming, and we will learn about dinosaurs! Speedy will be going home with Julia this weekend.

ToonDoo

Our class has been exploring with an awesome website, http://www.toondoo.com/
With this free website, students have the ability to create a comic strip choosing their own characters, backgrounds, and speech bubbles. To practice using this new tool, for morning work on Friday, we used ToonDoo to create comics explaining how the digestive system works (great review of what we learned in Science this week). Check out some of our comics:

Digestive System by room203 | Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com