This n That

Iowa Assessments

Next week we'll begin taking the Iowa Assessment tests (formerly ITBS).  We will take the tests October 29 - Nov 3.    Please help your child to be prepared for testing by eating a healthful breakfast and getting a full night's sleep.  Many thanks to those who have volunteered to provide "brain food" for students during testing.  

We practiced taking some sample tests so that students could get a feel for what the testing will be like.  After a few practice rounds, they caught on.

P/T Conferences
We look forward to meeting with our third grade families next week (and the following week) for conferences.  If you are unsure of the date/time of your conference, please contact your child's homeroom teacher.

Kidblog
The students are so very excited to be allowed to blog from home . . . If you haven't read this post on how to help your child blog at home (and to learn how YOU can read/comment on the kidblog entries, please take a moment to read all about it.

{tgif !} - Stations

Today's stations included catching up on math and language assignments, blogging about articles that we read in our Time For Kids magazine, and creating spooky lanterns.

Mrs. Hartsock's Reading Group - by Noah Miller

We read a story about the Tewas, called Dancing Rainbows.  Tewas are Indians that live in New Mexico. They danced for many reasons.  A couple of the reasons are to cure the sick and to have fun.  Tewas have a special celebration called Feast Day when they dance and have a big feast. We worked on main ideas and details.  Main ideas are a "big" topic (like trains or eagles), and details tell something specific about the topic (like eagles have a wingspan that is 7 feet long). We also blogged about things that we celebrate. We had to use a main idea and details when we blogged. We had lots of fun!



Answering comprehension questions

Determining the main idea/details of a story (this was a challenge for many students!)

Social Studies - by Ethan Kos

In social studies we learned that you have to be 18 years old or older to vote. Not everybody can vote. If you are not a citizen, you have to take a [citizenship] test [and become a citizen] before you can vote.  We learned that there are elections for mayors, governors, and presidents.  When you vote in an election, you go to a booth to vote (you might have a paper to write on, something to poke, or you might vote on the computer). If you are in a different state or you can't vote on the election day, you have to mail an absentee ballot before the election.

Language Skills - by Grace Miller

Our spelling words this week all have a long i sound. Some examples are words like wild, and mind.  We worked on plural nouns.  We had to categorize plural nouns by special plural forms and [nouns that] change y to i and add es.  We wrote questions for someone in third grade. Then we mixed up our papers and we answered the questions [that someone else wrote]. And then we guessed who answered the questions that we wrote.  Then the teachers told us who really did answer our questions.

Spelling practice

Typing our answers to questions written by a classmate

Trying to guess who answered the questions we wrote

3H behavior party - by Ivana Ebersole

We got 10 compliments so we got to have a party.  Teachers gave us compliments when we were being awesome.  Mrs. Brenneman gave us a compliment [when she was our substitute] because we were acting good.  We voted on what our party was going to be.  We picked having a read and feed. The kids brought snacks and drinks from home to school.  We set them out on the table and we all went in a line and got some food. Then we got a book and we read while we ate. It was fun and we had a lot of food.

PS - Thanks for sending snacks for the students to enjoy!  - Mrs. H.

Math by Will Cavanagh

In math we're doing measuring.  We are measuring the room and our body.  It is unit 3 in our math book.  The homework is measuring our parents and on Thursday we had to measure our table and then how many tables could we put in our room, one on top of the other.

From Mrs. Bender: The kids continue to struggle with multi-digit adding and subtracting.  It will occur again on our math boxes, but this is a skill that could be practiced in the evening.

Science by Avery Frede

This year we have learned about water.  Now I think we are going to learn about electricity.  Everybody gets to do something.  We did an experiment one time, we either were in a group or by our selves.  We also made some questions for the class.  We learned about evaporation and condensation, thats mostly what we remember.

From Mrs. Bender: we are wrapping up our independent experiments next week.  Then we will spend some time learning about cells an the bones as part of our Health unit.  By then, our new kit, electricity, should have arrived.

Kidblog update

We've been blogging for several weeks, and students are doing a great job and are able to navigate the site independently (for the most part).  SO - we have decided that students are ready to access the blog from home to read and post comments (comments only, no new posts for now) if they wish.  PARENTS (and other family members) are also now able to leave comments on student posts.  Read on to learn more . . .

• We have added a "Guest" login feature to our blog.  Parents/friends/family members are welcome to log in as Guest (listed as the last choice in the login menu), and use the password "123" to leave comments on the blog.  As with all entries, a teacher will need to approve any comments made by a guest before they will appear on the blog site.  (It may be several hours before this happens if you post in the evening.)

• To find your child's blog posts, you can either scroll through the list of post titles (there are several pages of posts already!), or find his/her name in the list in the directory at the right and click on it to take you to only your child's posts.

• Students are now allowed to leave COMMENTS outside of class time, but should not post new blog posts.

• As always, all comments should be written in the form of complete sentences, related to the post, and should be helpful and kind.  Comments not meeting our criteria will not be published.

Remember, you can always access our kidblog site by clicking on the kidblog tab at the top of our KE Third Grade blog.  
The url is:  http://kidblog.org/KE3rdGrade/

This And That

• Be sure to check your child's Friday folder for your P/T conference slip indicating the time/date of your conference.  Please return the lower portion of the page to confirm the scheduled conference

• Next week we'll begin some practice testing to prepare for the Iowa Assessments tests (formerly Iowa Tests of Basic Skills) that we will take October 29 - Nov 2.  Look for a note on Monday requesting volunteers to provide "brain food" for the actual testing dates.  In addition, please help your child to be prepared for testing by eating a healthful breakfast and getting a full night's sleep.

apps (for ipads/smart phones)

We're very fortunate to have ipads to use in our classrooms this year!  We are learning together with the students the many ways in which we can use them to help us learn.  Some of the apps that we have found (that are free!) that we enjoy using are listed below. . . . we thought that those of you with a device that supports apps might like to intall them so that your child can use them at home too.  Also - if you know of any apps that you think would be helpful to use in the classroom, please let us know!

Bluster - a making words game, useful for practice identifying prefixes/sufixes, root words, homophones, and more

Word Boom - a making words game, kind of like scrabble

Pop Words - change a given word to create new words (or in challenge mode the user has to change a given word to a specific new word) by changing one letter at a time.

Math Ninja - learn basic math facts

Spelling City - an app for the website - search for Jill Hartsock to work on our spelling lists


Students enjoy using the ipads to reinforce a skill we've learned in class, during stations, and as early finisher activities.

Language Skills

Spelling words this week were a little trickier -- some words contained an "unexpected spelling pattern" or silent letter (ex. knee), and others contained consonant clusters (spread).  We continue to work on writing and correcting sentences to create complete sentences.  Students learned how to use key words from questions to create an answer in the form of a statement.  We're also continuing to work on lower case cursive letters.

Reading with Mrs. Hartsock

Our shared reading story this week was The Talking Cloth.  Ask your child to summarize (one of our skills this week!) this realistic fiction story.  In this story, we learned about Adinkra cloth, which is cloth made by an African tribe and has lots of symbolism.  Students enjoyed blogging on kidblog about what their Adinkra cloth would look like.

(again - forgot the camera!) :(

Math by KaiLeigh Purcell

Parents and Grandparents,
This week in math we've been doing subtraction, adding using partial sums and math story questions.  We also have been working with money story problems, and doing math games.  Some are fun and your kids have been doing great.

*From Mrs. Bender - remember to help your students return their math homework the next day for class!  Also, we will be taking the Unit 2 test on Monday.  You may want to spend some time practicing the addition and subtraction facts this weekend.

Social Studies

We continue to learn about government, and this week focused on what it means to be a citizen, as well as the rights and responsibilities we have as US citizens.  Voting was identified as a very important right AND responsibility that we have.  We began discussing how voting works in the US, and will continue learning more about voting next week.

(Sorry - no pictures!)

Reading with Mrs. Bender by Ashlyn Gugel

Our story this week was called The Talking Cloth by Rhonda Mitchell.  After reading the story, the kids wanted to create their own cloths.  The kids learned each Adinkra has symbols that represent faith, power and love.  They also learned each color represents a feeling.  White is for joy, yellow for riches, green for newness and growth, blue is for love and red is worn for sad times.  We had lots of love, newness and joy in our classroom.  We also worked on puzzling plurals and rhyming crossword pages.

Science by Madeline Nonnenmann

At science were doing experiments of chemical and physical changes.  Everyone is having a fun time in science!  Some groups are doing things on weather.  Our focus is on the water cycle but now we are doing our own experiments.  We do lots of tests, some hard, some not.  Science is pretty fun this time of year.

Stations

This week we worked on following written directions.  The kids had directions to follow in creating their owl - lots of interesting interpretations. :)  We also finished up math, added comments to our writing blog (see Mrs. Hartsock's blog post below) and played some math games in Cool Math 4 Kids, and used the Smart board.