Last Day of November

I can't believe we are already at the end of November! Is this year just flying by or what? I can't believe it!

Today was a pretty good day considering the kids have had 4 days off in a row (or 5 for those who left for their holiday weekends early!). We spent time reading and getting back into the routine of the days. Then we had time to start writing back to our pen pals. Last week our pen pals from Bellevue, WA wrote us back and the students were SO excited! It was nice to finally hear about what our pen pals had to say. We had a lot of questions for them and things to tell them! We also had two other letters to write to thank our donors for their donations. Earlier this year I submitted a project on a great website called donorschoose.org. It is a website that allows teachers to submit requests for materials for their classroom and donors from around the country can donate money to fund the projects. I submitted a project for some reading games, magnetic letters, and reading center materials and it got funded fully last week so we are getting the materials soon! It was really exciting and so we now have to write thank you letters to our donors to thank them for the generosity.

Once we were done writing we had art later the afternoon to learn about different textures we could make with the materials we had in our classroom and paint. We explored wax resisting by drawing designs with crayons and painting over it with water colors. The pictures turned out great! Then we painted with brush strokes, cotton balls, sponges, and pipe cleaners to create different patterns. It was great to see the different patterns and textures the students make.

Tomorrow is library so make sure you remember to bring your books. Also, make sure that you have your students bringing their backpacks - several students don't think they need to bring them anymore for some reason! :) See you tomorrow!

The Christmas Season is Here!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with plenty of food and family surrounding you!

Since Thanksgiving is over, the Christmas season is here! I changed the background to reflect the Christmas spirit. It is my favorite holiday since my birthday is Christmas eve too, so the background may change often because there are so many to choose from! :) Hope you all are in the spirit too!

Thanksgiving and the Play

The Thanksgiving play yesterday went incredibly well! Thank you so much for the family members who were able to make it to the performance yesterday afternoon. The students were really nervous as they started to see our room fill up with staff, family, and the rest of the elementary students! In the end, they did a great job reading their lines and transitioning with the 5 scenes we had. Great job third graders! We will be doing more performances during the year so keep an eye out for the invitations in the future!

The kids are definitely ready for this long break (and so am I!). I hope everyone takes the time to rest and relax with family and friends this weekend and enjoy the things in their lives they can be grateful for. Today the kids all discussed what they were thankful for and most of them said they were thankful for their grandparents. I thought that was so sweet and then I asked why. Unanimously it was because they "weren't dead yet"! Oh goodness. Well I suppose that is something that we do need to be thankful for! I was just surprised at how direct and to the point they were about it! :)

Happy Thanksgiving to all and we will see you Monday, rested and recharged!

A Crazy Monday

Today was a wild Monday... mostly for behaviors. The upcoming 4-day weekend bug has infected all of the students and made them not very excited to do anything that involves any effort! Yikes!

Luckily we made it through the day together. We spent a lot of time practicing our scripts for tomorrow's play (which is tomorrow at 2:45 p.m. if you want to join us!). The students also got time to finish their backdrops for the performance. I am excited to see how much effort they are putting into the backdrops and how they really are taking pride in their work.

During writing we finished writing our "How to Cook A Turkey" stories, which turned out very well. It is always fun to see how each student uses their very own recipe to cook their turkey. Keep an eye out in your student's bags tomorrow for a copy of this to be coming home with them! Definitely a great Thanksgiving read!

This afternoon we started learning about gallons, pints, quarts, and cups but making a friend for "Gallon Man" - a superhero who is very lonely. We will be finishing these projects tomorrow so Gallon Man won't be lonely anymore! He will have 13 new friends!

Third graders also received some really exciting news... we are getting 3 computers for the classroom! This will be an amazing addition to the room to be able to fit more technology integrated into the activities we do every day. This will also be a great motivator for students when they are doing their writing since they can publish on the computer and print their writing off. There is something about seeing your writing in print, as opposed to handwriting, that is incredibly motivating!

Hope you all have great evenings and can't wait to see you all tomorrow!

Thanksgiving Performance

I just wanted to update you all on the Thanksgiving Performance we have coming up.

On Tuesday, November 24th at 2:45 p.m. we will be putting on our Thanksgiving play for family and students at Frontier. You are all welcome to join us and see your student's hard work this week. Keep an eye out on Monday for the formal invitation to be sent home. We just finished finalizing it on Friday so it will be coming home Monday. I hope you all can make it!

Last Friday in November!

Today we had a great end to a long week for us. With conferences being so late on Tuesday we were all feeling pretty exhausted. Especially with the upcoming holiday weekend next week, we were all feeling ready for the weekend.

Today we had a vocabulary quiz and a spelling quiz. We also had our Thanksgiving raffle assembly this afternoon which was a lot of fun. It was hard for some of the students to understand how they could buy so many raffle tickets and not win anything. That is definitely a hard concept to understand, especially for younger students. And really, how do you help them understand? I suppose it is just something that will come with age and experience. It may be a good talking point for the dinner table, though. To hear from family members that we always don't get what we want, and that we don't always get to win is an important concept to understand.

Looking ahead, we have a short week coming up next week with the Thanksgiving holiday on the horizon. Monday and Tuesday are standard full days. Wednesday, however, is an early release day with students out of school at noon.

I hope you all have fantastic weekends and can't wait to see those smiling faces in school in Monday! Rest and stay healthy!

Book Orders Due Tomorrow!

Just wanted to remind everyone that Scholastic book orders are due tomorrow in class or online. I will be submitting the order after school. Thank you for your orders!

Just as a reminder...

The website is.... www.scholastic.com/bookclubs
Login name - FrontierThirdGrade
Password - order

Thank you!

Two Days and No Post!

I am so sorry that two days have passed without a post on my part! Things have been so crazy lately.

It was great to meet with so many of you last night for conferences! It was good to know that we are on the same page and both just want the best for your student and their education.

The past two days we have been learning more about the first Thanksgiving. On Monday we spent time comparing what the Pilgrims ate on the first Thanksgiving dinner with what we eat. That sure made some of us feel thankful we didn't have to eat barley, eel, and shellfish as part of dinner! :) The students were also surprised with how many things were similar to what we eat at Thanksgiving. Corn, wild turkey, and deer were all part of that first dinner! Yum!

Yesterday the students were introduced to a Reader's Theater play that we are starting about how the Pilgrims finding their way to the New World and what they had to do to get along in the New World. I don't think the students realized that there wasn't hotels and people waiting for them with a hot dinner ready!

Today the students were assigned their parts and so we practiced reading the script through a couple of times. Groups also started designing the backdrops for the play. The students are really excited to start with the play and the process of preparing for the play. It is great to see such enthusiasm and excitement to perform from even the more soft spoken students. We are going to perform this play for the rest of the elementary wing on Tuesday, November 24th in the afternoon (the time right now is unclear). Families are more than welcome to attend and I will keep you updated with times as I get more information.

Hope you all have a great evening!

Book Orders Make Great Gifts

Just wanted to put out a quick reminder that our book orders are due November 19th by the end of the day. The students were sent home the paper copies of the book orders for the month last week. You are also encouraged to order books online from scholastic.com/bookclubs. For every order you make online, our class gets free books to add to our classroom library. On the book club site, you will use the user name FrontierThirdGrade to login. The password is order.

Since the holiday season is right around the corner, book orders are a great way to order gifts for your student that are relatively inexpensive, entertaining, and also educational. Here are some popular books and teacher recommendations

From the Arrow Flyer

1. The Robe of Skulls - $4
2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days - $7
3. Diary of a Wimpy Kid Duo - $12

From the Lucky Flyer

1. The Absent Author - $1
2. Christmas in Camelot - $3
3. Junie B. Jones 9 book set - $20
4. Diary of a Wimpy Kid Trio - $15
5. Talent Show from the Black Lagoon - $2
6. The Talented Clementine - $3
7. Magic Tree House Boxed Set -$14

If you want to order any of these books for your student I can arrange for a time for you to pick them up before or after school so they are a surprise for your student. Thanks! Happy shopping!

A Great Friday!

Today was a fabulous end to the week for us in third grade!

Today we spent our morning reading and doing our vocabulary and phonics quizzes. Our afternoon was filled with math, a spelling quiz, class payday, and our class store! The kids were excited as usual to get paid (especially knowing that the new $20 and $50 were up for grabs). Classroom store went well but students were more interested in bartering with one another than buying things from the class store this week. Some students learned the power of being a good sales person for their product though and really cleaned up! Others didn't do a whole lot to market their items and were disappointed with their returns. It is a learning process I suppose.

This afternoon the students were also awarded by our janitor for having the cleanest room in the building for the first quarter! Mr. Dempsey brought us a certificate and a bag of candies to share! Now maybe I won't get so many groans and grunts when I ask students to clean the floors! They made it their personal goals to keep our rooms the cleanest all year... Excellent goal in my opinion.

Just as a reminder, we are still collecting Boxtops for Education, Campbells Soup Labels, toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, wrapping paper rolls, unwanted (but child appropriate) magazines and empty egg cartons. Thank you for all of those families who have donated so far!

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend full of rest so we can all be healthy on Monday! See you then!

Animoto.com

First Day of Conferences Over

Congratulations to Kassie for being the first third grader so far to join the elite "Thousand Page Club"! She has read more than 1000 pages so far this year! She earned a certificate, $100 Dunnies, and a free homework pass! Awesome work!

Today was great to meet with some of you today to talk about your fantastic students. I can't wait to meet with the rest of you on Tuesday evening. I love to see that we are on the same page with your students' education. They are a very smart group of students and I expect to see that every day in their classroom participation and work.

Today was a super short day for the kids which made things go by so quickly! We spent time finishing sorting "bossy R" words (which are words with ir, ur, ar, er, and or). Each student got to make a book of the words that they sorted out. Such creativity from the students!

During reading, the students had 3 more conferences with me so we are well on our way to our hundred books! I have challenged the class to try and get the hundred books read by the end of the quarter (which is January 18)... we are in good shape to get there!

The kids are also really excited today because our classroom economy was given some new money - a $20 and a $50 bill! I have never seen students so excited for some fake money! They are eager to keep earning money, so that is a great thing. Tomorrow we have our classroom store planned which is really exciting for the students. If you are ever interested in donating materials for our classroom store, send it in with your students. They love candy, books, pencils and more! I always love seeing what they choose!

Have great evenings and get plenty of rest... we are all starting to get sick around here and we want us all to stay as healthy as possible!

Conferences Start Today!

Sorry for a lack of posting yesterday. Preparations for conferences were in full swing, and in an effort to try to ward off the coming sickness I completely forgot!

Today I am excited to meet with some of you to talk about all of your wonderful children! They have made such an amazing amount of progress in only 53 days of school. I am impressed!

Today I have the following conferences scheduled.

1:00 - Semarah
1:15 - Billy
1:30 - Imani
1:45 - Mary
2:00 - Kirsten
2:15 - Theo

Thanks for making it in and I can't wait to see you all this afternoon!

Wild Tuesday

Today was a pretty wild day. The third graders must know that they have that half day coming up because boy were they crazy this afternoon! :)

Today we spend time doing a math assessment, practicing our spelling with a game called Cherry Pie (ask your student about this one... they beg to play!), and finishing an art project we started last week on warm and cool colors.

I am noticing a trend with the students lately. Not as many have been bringing in their homework. This would be a great dinner table conversation to have tonight to make sure students are doing their best. Homework is graded on an "effort" basis. If students do their homework, and it is complete, they get full credit. No homework turned in, means a zero in the grading book. While homework itself is only worth 5-10 points, not turning in homework will significantly change the students' grades over the course of the quarter. We have homework EVERY Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. There are few exceptions to that rule, and generally occur when we have a short week or a holiday week. If those exceptions are the case I will keep the blog updated with no homework.

Students are also required to make up any missed homework and assignments when they are gone. While I support students being gone when they are ill, so the rest of the class does not get infected, it is extremely important that students are here EVERY DAY. When students miss school they are missing out on valuable learning time and are being put behind of the rest of their classmates when they are absent. It is much harder on students who are gone because they are expected to pick up where the class left off, rather than where they left off when they were last at school. Thank you to those families who are supportive in making sure their students are here, every day, and on time!

Another Monday behind us!

Well another Monday for the school year is gone! Today was day 50 so we are just cruising through the school year!

Today we spent time reading our new story for the week, "The Mysterious Giant of Barletta" by Tomie dePaola. Tomie dePaola is one of my favorite children's authors so I was very excited to share this story with the third graders! We also had an opportunity to choose new books from the classroom library. I love seeing the kids pick out new books... it is always fun to see what everyone chooses to read!

Today I also sent home book orders with the students! The book orders are due November 19th back in the school or online. I set up online book club shopping for the class and Scholastic fixed the online issue that we were having last month. To order online follow the link to

www.scholastic.com/bookclubs

User name: FrontierThirdGrade

Password: order

Every time you order online our class gets a free book for the classroom library so it is a great option. Plus, you have the convenience of ordering any time online.

Tonight was another great set of basketball games at Frontier. Great job to the boys and girls teams! You played a great game!

Perfect Attendance - First Quarter

Congratulations third graders with perfect attendance! Kassie, Paisley, and Theo! Great job and keep that perfect record going! Enjoy your free ice cream, too!

A Great End to the Week

Today we had a great end to the week!

We spent time reading this morning and the students spent time practicing the stories they wrote about an art project we did. The students made a "computer bug" and had to write about their bugs, telling all about the lives of the bugs. This week we have spent time recording those stories on my computer and I am in the process of making a slide show for those stories. So far they are really good!

This afternoon we had an assembly honoring the students that had perfect attendance last quarter - meaning they were at school, all day, every day. Three students from our class received that award so congratulations to Paisley, Kassie, and Theo! Great work!

The students who didn't have any write ups (which happened to be ALL of the third grade) were also given an extra half hour recess! Great work third graders for staying write up free all quarter. Let's keep up that amazing work this quarter!

Have a great and relaxing weekend! Pictures will be posted this weekend from the assembly!

Personal Space

Today we had a discussion about personal space. Recently the students have had a lot of trouble with understanding physical boundaries between one another. A great dinner table conversation would be talking about physical boundaries and what to do if another person invades that personal space. Lately, pinching, bear hugs, and hands in each other's face has caused several students to feel uncomfortable as well as become a safety issue among students. I absolutely enjoy the fact that students at Frontier enjoy seeing one another and enjoy being around one another (especially since we are such a small school and they are pretty much forced to interact). However, when students are feeling uncomfortable in a classroom because other students are always touching and hugging them (even if it is meant to be friendly) the classroom environment, and the environment of the school overall, is changed. I strive to make my classroom a place where students feel safe and cared for. We have had a couple of discussions as a class about the issue but the touching continues and seems to be occurring more often as the days pass. Thank you for taking the time to talk with these issues with your student to make our classroom and our school a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

Reminders:

1. Tomorrow students have a spelling quiz so don't forget to practice those words at home!
2. Seventh graders are selling raffle tickets for the Thanksgiving raffle. They are raffling off pies, a turkey, and a ham. If you want to purchase those tickets, they are 50 cents each or three for one dollar.
3. If you have family or friends that currently or have ever served in the armed forces, send names and/or pictures with your student to add to our Veteran's Day bulletin board to support the amazing things our armed forces do for us each and every day.

Wednesday!

Today was another great day of behaviors for the students. I am so impressed with how well they have been doing this week! Keep up the great work third graders!

Today we learned about voiced and unvoiced /th/ sounds which the kids really enjoyed. Ask your student about these words to test their skills

• those
• they
• tooth
• think

We also continued exploring more about water with science this afternoon. We predicted which objects would be more dense or less dense than water between a cork, wooden ball, rubber stopper, and a penny. The kids were surprised to find out that the penny and rubber stopper were more dense and sunk, while the cork and wooden ball were less dense than water and floated! They then spent time experimenting with whether cold water was more or less dense than room temperature water. The cold water was dyed blue so they loved seeing the results right in front of their eyes!

Looking ahead slightly, we are collecting pictures for Veteran's Day (since that is next Wednesday already!) and making a bulletin board in the elementary wing of the building. If you have photos of any family or friends who have ever served in the armed forces for the US then please send pictures or names with your student as soon as possible. We are trying to collect as many as possible to really celebrate all of the wonderful things that are armed forces do for us. Feel free to email me with names as well if that is easier!

Also, seventh graders will start selling their raffle tickets this week for the Thanksgiving drawing. They are raffling off a turkey, ham, and several pies. The tickets are fifty cents each or three for $1.00!

Next week (the 12th) conferences start already! You will be getting notices home soon telling you about the timeline for conferences and the schedule we will be working with. I can't wait to see you (and meet some of you for the first time) and talk about your amazing students. What a great group of kids to start teaching with!

Have a great evening!

Halloween Party Slideshow

Here are a couple of pictures from our Halloween party last Thursday. The kids had a great time! Enjoy!

A Fast Day!

Wow! What a day!

Today we continued our reading of Dogzilla, which all of the students are really loving. We practiced our writing process skills and learned about antonyms (ask your student if they remember). Then, this afternoon we made thermometers and found out what happens when you put the thermometer in cold water and hot water. The kids were absolutely fascinated with the process and are doing extremely well with our current science unit of study, which is water.

Tonight the boys and girls basketball teams played (for 5th and 6th grade)! Congratulations to the girls team who beat Frazer 24 - 12. A great game to the boys team who played their hardest, but were defeated by Frazer.

Keep up the great work third graders! Tomorrow I will post the picture slide show from our Halloween party last week! Be on the look out!

Our Book Race

Congratulations to all of the third graders for being amazing readers and beating fourth grade at the end of quarter one on the number of books read! At the end of the day on Thursday fourth grade had 33 books read, and we had 45 books read this year. That is simply amazing and you all deserve a round of applause. Keep up the great work and the great reading!

November Already!

Today was a great day at school today! I was so pleased to see that the sugar rush from Halloween has worn off and all of the students were back in their normal routines. Congratulations!

Today we learned about Los Dias de los Muertos - a Mexican holiday where loved ones who have died are celebrated. To do this we made skulls that were decorated with a lot of different colors and patterns like the the ones made in Mexico on November 1st and 2nd. We also made tissue paper marigolds which are meant to help the spirits of loved ones find their families. The kids really liked learning some Spanish phrases and words. My Spanish is a little rusty (the last time I took Spanish was 5 years ago in high school) but it is great to get to practice it again and share it with my students who love it so much!

Tomorrow is library so don't forget to bring your library books!