Week
6
Finalizing
the 6 Regions
This week we finally finished up our 6 regions project! They
turned out great! The kids really put in a lot of hard work and time to
complete these projects. It was interesting to see the regions isolated and
then put together to create the state of SC. Some things that they noticed were
that some of the rivers connected and some didn’t. We discussed what could have
caused some of these things as well. You can find our finished product outside
of our classroom. I noticed that some of the kids were sharing our SC Regions
map with you all as you waited for your parent/teacher/student conference. The
other 3rd grade students are infatuated with the map and have been
coming up to the kids as recess to ask about it! I’m proud of their ability to
articulate everything that they’ve learned over these past few weeks about the
regions.
Reading
with Purpose
We all know that our kids love to read, and I’m so grateful that
they do. Reading is so important and it’s so good for the mind, but also for
the emotions. We’ve had conversations based on “why do you read”. At first I
heard a lot of responses along the lines of: becoming smarter, learning new
words, and to read better. After I explained to them that I wasn’t looking for
a certain answer and that I wanted to know their personal opinion of why they
liked to read, I heard a lot more genuine answers: to escape to another world,
to go on adventures, to laugh, and to be someone else.
To better help them to understand themselves as readers, I
believe that it was important for them to understand someone else as a reader.
Their homework for this week was to interview a parent or adult at home to see
whom that person was as a reader (what books do they like to read, where do
they like to read, when’s the last time they read, etc.)! The kids were so
excited to share their interviews with the class and found lots of similarities
amongst their parents. =)
As we’re beginning to adventure into our own writing of books, I
figured that we could use some mentor texts to help us understand how different
authors help the reader to understand their story plot and different author’s techniques.
They were allowed to pick any picture book that appealed to their small group
and dive into it! I’m excited to see what they notice as we continue next week.
Another fun and purposeful activity we’re starting, or rather
starting up again, is our student read aloud. Each day a kid from the class
will share a read aloud with our class. This will benefit the kids by building
their confidence for being in front of an audience, give them a chance to
practice their listening skills and their reading skills, expose them to new
books that they might have never considered, and finally it allows them to see
their peers as mentors and encourage them to go to their classmates for advice
or techniques in reading!
A
Habitat Visual
We have not officially plunged into our habitat unit; however,
we have begun to think of some things we would like to learn within this unit.
They kids used their chrome books, textbooks, and picture books to explore
different habitats. It was their job to create a visual of the habitat they had
picked and to include 3 interesting things that they noticed about the habitat
and include 1 question that they had or something they wanted to learn about.
They presented these to the class and found out lots of cool new things about
each habitat. We will begin looking a little more closely at each habitat next
week.
Spelling
and Word Recognition
I know that many of you are concerned about your child’s
spelling. I want you all to know that we are working on it!! I am not assigning
spelling words on a whole class or small group level. However, we have been
looking on word patterns and word recognition to help us improve our spelling!
Please, do not fret! Spelling is not as important as having the techniques or
skills to figure out spelling.
Book
Buddies
What another fantastic Friday of book buddies! The kids read
with their book buddies and even shared some of their reading strategies with
their new friends. We are looking forward to working with our book buddies
again next Friday! =)
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