With all the stuff happening lately, we have missed our chances to do our memory verse on both Friday and Monday (today). My apologizes and we will try to get back to a regular schedule for the memory verses. That said, we will do last weeks memory verse tomorrow. The memory verse for this week, which we will do on Friday is from Jeremiah 29:11:
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
We had a nice surge of users on Spelling City last week. Keep it up and remember, the Spelling City has lots of other great resources including games and printable handwriting practice with the spelling words for the week.
It has been a couple of very busy weeks recently. The students have been working hard and we are now just putting the finishing pieces onto our Daily 3 Language Arts Program. It has been a long process but the modeling and all the work that went into setting it and getting the students comfortable with the process is paying off. We started the last piece. “Listening To Reading” today with the introduction of the media players. Students will be listening to audiobooks on tape, CD and the computer. Hearing professional readers reading pieces of literature is a great way for students to build reading fluency. Hearing the reading on the tape or CD while following along in the books helps the brain hear and practice good, fluent reading. As well, we will be using a website called RAZ Kids as part of the Listening to Reading Program. This website allows students to read books at their own level at home. The system has been set up for their level already. Once the students log in, they can read books, have books read to them, and take quizzes about their book to earn stars which they can use to add things to their “Rocket Ships“. Once our program is flowing well, I will release access to the students to work on it at home. For now, we are just using it at school.
So with the addition of the “Listening To Reading” portion of the Daily 3 program, we now have all elements in place. Students will now be choosing on of the three parts of the program to do each day, with most days allowing opportunities for more than one choice. By the end of the week, all students should have had a chance to complete all three areas. This will also be replacing our D.E.A.R time which was a free reading time.
The three areas students will be working on now, in summary, are:
Read to Self: Students working on reading by themselves focusing on reading the words, reading the pictures and re-telling the story.
Read To Others: Students read with a partner choosing either to read the same book or read different books. As they reading they are either practicing reading fluency or reading comprehension. Students have summarize each page or section that has been read to them to show that they are listening and comprehending.
Listening To Reading: The newest section of the program, students read books while listening to them as a way to practice fluency and vocabulary.
We have also talked about how to pick good books that are the “right fit”. A “Good Fit” book is one where the student gets to pick the book, they are picking it for a purpose and they are interested in it. It should also be a book where they are able to comprehend most of what they are reading AND it is a book where most of the words are familiar and can be read by the child with high accuracy.
If you come across any used cd players or tape players you would be willing to donate, please continue to send them our way. We can always use more!
I have also included the link for Spelling City here. Remember, if you print off your certificate and bring it in, it will count as an extra point on your spelling test on Friday. Also, parents, if you do not have access to a printer or it breaks down, just sign your child’s planner with a note stating that they did complete the test and got 100% and that will count as well. Make sure to tell your child to show it to me as I may not see it in time otherwise.
Our memory verse this week is from Matthew 7:7:
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
The students have once again earned a party, which we will have on Friday afternoon. I have asked the students to bring a snack for the class if they are able to. As the year is now fully into swing and expectations have been set and understood, students will be having to earn more stars in order to earn further parties. They are now working on 50 stars and will then be required to earn 75 stars. I have stressed to the students that these are their choices as to whether they earn stars or have stars taken away. By stressing this, I am helping students to understand that they are the ones that decide their own behaviour; that it is not me arbitrarily deciding when they get stars or have stars taken away. They are the ones that choose. I believe that this is a very important distinction.
Finally, I want to thank everyone for the hard work and effort that went into the Science Challenge. All the vehicles showed great creativity and team work! It was so neat to see how such simple materials could result in so many different yet wonderful realizations. I hope that you also found this a rewarding time as you had a chance to work with your child and see the wonderful capabilities a child has for creativity. Now, don’t worry! We will not be doing this every week but about once a month or so I will throw another challenge out there for your family! I have taken photos of all the projects which I will turn into an Animoto for you. For now though, I thought I would end off with a science video as a reward for getting this far and reading all the way to the end.
Monday was a great day!!! The students are having a lot of fun but are also able to get right down to work when we need to get stuff done. Our Daily 3 reading program is really going well and students have made it to 21 mins with non-stop reading!!!
In writing, we are working on ideas for writing using literature as a starting point to writing our own stories. We first took a look at “Tulip Sees America”; a story about a boy and his dog who go on travels throughout the United States describing all the things they see on the way. The students enjoyed the story and we used it as a springboard for our own writing on places we have been too. Using Google Earth, we flew around the world (just like my evil, twin brother Bob. If you don’t know who that is, just ask your child!) and plotted all the places we have been too. Using those places, students then listed things they did there and details about those events or things they remember about that trip. Our last step was to write out our stories about our adventures in the places we visited. The students all wrote some very interesting stories and I will be putting some on the blog very soon! Our next story is going to be an animal story using the book, “If You Give A Pig A Pancake”. Using that book, students will pick their own animal and describe the silly adventures that ensue. It should be quite interesting!
On Oct. 3, Highroad Academy will be offering a seminar on Spell to Write and Read. This is the program we use as our spelling program. We have had tremendous success in improving, not only student’s spelling skills, but also their reading and writing through a focus on phonograms and spelling rules. This seminar is for all new parents to our school or anyone who has not taken the seminar. You can also attend if you need a refresher on the foundations of the SWR program. Please contact me if you wish to attend. If you are new to the school or have not attended this class before, I would strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly encourage you to attend. It is a free seminar and runs from 9 am – 12 pm.
Request for help – For one part of our Daily 3 Reading Program, students will be involved in listening to books on tapes, cd’s and other devices. To fully integrate this into our reading program, I need some more of these devices for the classroom use. If you have any old portable tape player, portable CD players or unused MP3 players kicking around your house that you would not mind donating to the class, please contact me. I am hoping to collect a number of devices to use with the students. I have a few of my own already that we can use. However, the more we have, the more students we can fit into this section of the Daily 3. Thank you!
Sorry . . . Four Things!!!
There is no spelling or memory verse this week due to the shortened week. We will resume with both of those parts of our class program next week.
Spelling Words, Memory Verses and Class News, O My!
Happy Monday! Yes, I know that sounds strange. How can you have a Happy Monday? Easy! Come to Mr. H’s class and see all the hard working fun we have!!!
The students had a great day and we got lots of work done. In Language Arts, we are working on a great reading program called The Daily 3. This program strives to build students into independent readers who have the stamina to read for longer and longer periods of time while using a variety of comprehension skills to aid the understanding of what they are reading.
It is a great program and I am already seeing great results. We have started with the first part of the program called Read to Self. The idea of this part of the program is to focus on building stamina and reading for longer periods of time. Right now, the students have reached 11 minutes which is fantastic!!
At the beginning of each reading period we discuss the appropriate behaviours and the three types of reading that students can use to read their books. We talked as a class about reading the words of a story, reading the pictures of a story and re-telling the story. In the next couple of weeks, we are going to be reaching 30 minutes of focused reading everyday. We will also be talking about how to choose appropriate books for their reading ability. The it will be time to move to the next sections of the program: Reading to Others and Listening To Reading. The students are very excited and I have already heard many of the children saying that they love reading.
Here are the spelling words for this week: Spelling J3
Here is something new this week. I introduced the students to a new website called Spelling City. It is a great site where students can see their spelling words, learn their spelling words, test their spelling words and play games using their spelling words. Whew! That’s a lot of “spelling words” words! The other neat thing is that students can print out handwriting pages with their spelling words and practice handwriting their words. They can even print out the words as sign language and practice signing them!!!! It’s a great site and it’s FREE!!!! I love free!!
All you have to do is click the Spelling City box with the J3 on it below.
Every Monday, there will be another box. Clicking on the box will take you straight to the spelling list for that week.
No hard links to remember, no fancy addresses to type out, no clicking through page after page of websites to get there! No Sireeee!!!!! You just click a simple click on the Spelling City box and you are there.
I have also told the students that if they test themselves and get 100%, they should print out the test results and/or the certificate and bring it to me for a bonus mark on their spelling marks for the report card!!!!
Finally, students received their first memory verses of the year. If you remember, I had sent home a homework reminder for the students to bring in their families favorite memory verses. This year, we are going to use those favorite verses for our memory verses. As these are special verses to people and mean a lot to each of us in different ways, I thought that it would be more meaningful for students to memorize those. Our first verse is below:
Dear Children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
1 John 3:18
Finally, here is a funny video I found. It is hilarious!! Just wait for the surprise at the end!!
Well, it has been an exciting day here in Grade 2/3 once again! Today for science, we started taking everything we have learned about Oobleck and it’s properties and have begun the process of designing vehicles that would be able to land/drive on an ocean of Oobleck, explore the ocean of Oobleck and be able to get off the ocean of Oobleck without being stuck.
At our last class, we had a convention. Scientists use conventions as a way to share ideas and to see what other scientists have done. At our convention, we came up with a list of important rules or properties we discovered about Oobleck. The students will have to keep these in mind as they design their Oobleck machines.
At the end of the class, we saw a little video showing what would happen if you walked or ran on Oobleck. Here is the video.
This video could help us understand how a vehicle would work on an ocean of Oobleck.
A big thank you to Aidan who discovered what would happen if you put a pan of water on a loud speaker. Aidan said that the water only splashed an made waves which is very different than what happened to the Oobleck.
On a completely different topic, here is our spelling list for the week. You can copy the words down to work on at home or you can just print a copy of the words using the option on the window below or downloading it from the Box.net widget to the right!
As well, don’t forget to mozy on over to the Spelling City page to practice your spelling words:
Our Memory Verse for this week comes courtesy of 1 John 3:18:
Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
We have also had a number of poems read since our last post with recordings in it. Click on the blue arrows below to hear some more of our students reading poems!
Yes, well . . . Apparently, my attempts to try and be more consistent in writing these posts has come to naught. However, I am here with this weeks spelling words, memory verse and various other things. Here is this weeks spelling list: Spelling 0-2
Here is the link for the Spelling City list:
Our memory verse for this week is very easy. It comes from Psalms and the many of the students already were very familiar with it. However, it is definately a favorite as many students chose it to include in the list of memory verses we collected at the beginning of the year.
Psalm 23
A psalm of David.
1The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.2He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Last week’s Science Challenge brought in some fantastic results. We have them hanging from the ceiling if you would like to come in and see them some time. I also created an animoto where you can see them all.
I have also included a new game in the links to the left. The games is called “Stars Over Half Moon Bay”. I am not sure you can call it a game though. Basically, you must select stars and drag them below the horizon. These stars can then be used to create constellations. That’s about it. Not quite as sophisticated as Dyson but it fits very nicely into our Space unit. Students have been learning all about constellations; how to find them and some neat facts about them. However, their final constellation is going to be one that they make up. They create their own constellation, draw it out and create neat facts about how their constellation came to be. Should be interesting.
Monday Spelling and Memory Verse (And, If You’re Very Good, A Surprise!)
Well, I guess the math video displayed well but the sound was very quiet and hard to hear. When I get a better mike, I will maybe redo the video so that you can hear it better. One thing to mention though, the video just describes multiplication without regrouping which means we are not “carrying”. Carrying will come next. We still had some students today who were having some difficulties with the multiplication so we will be spending lots more time on this concept.
Catching up on our Poetry Tournament, so far our winners are: April Rain Song, Why?, Me and Yesterday. Here are the four latest contestants reading their poems.
Speaking of poetry, here is another poem to add to our Daily Poem of the Day list:
Rock n Roll Dad
by
Jaime Adoff
Rock n Roll Dad cooks
in the kitchen
radio blasts
always on ten!!
It’s so LOUD, I have to shout,
“WHEN ARE WE GOING TO EAT!?”
Dad yells,
“SOOOOOON!”
Dancing past me with his spoon.
Pots shake,
pans vibrate.
Mom screams:
“It’s an earthquake!”
“What?” Dad yells back.
I roll my eyes.
Mom shakes her head.
Rock n Roll Dad is a little deaf.
“A lot.” Mom says.
“Too many years playing drums.” Rock n Roll Dad shouts, twirling his sticks and stirring the sauce.
“Can I go to the club with you tonight?” I ask Dad.
“You’re not old enough yet.” He answers back.
“I want to go. I’m eight years old. I’m old enough to Rock n Roll.”
. . . One day I’m gonna play the drums too.
My hands will fly so fast
my sticks will break the speed of sound.
I’ll be the best drummer in town.
I play the plates with my carrot stick-sticks.
Splashing salsa cymbals with my rock n roll chips . . .
For science today, students were comparing the sizes of different objects in space including the planets, moons and asteriods. Students had a number of images and had to categorize them according to 5 types: Smaller than a school, bigger than a school but smaller than the moon, bigger than the moon but smaller than Earth, Smaller Than the Sun but bigger than Earth and, finally, bigger than the Sun. Students were quite surprised to find that some objects were bigger than they thought and that some objects were a lot smaller than they thought. It was very interesting. I also found a video, courtesy of Mr. Munro that nicely shows the sizes of objects in space and gives a little perspective both things we ahve talked about in Science.
We had a little disappointment today in regards to our tomatoes. When I came in this morning, a few of the seedlings had been pulled from the soil. I guess there had a been a group in the evening and some children had been using the other side of the room. We have fixed things up as best as we could and are continuing on with the experiment. None of the students know which were pulled out as I replaced them with extras I had. However, the students were very disappointed as was I. I have been very pleased to see our curious and excited the children have been to see their plants grow and this will defineatly be a project I will do again. We are almost ready to send in our results. Once our results are in, they will notify us as to which seeds were which. Very exciting!!!!
Don’t forget about the Spelling Bee next week. Students will be doing the in-class Bee on Tuesday. We have the field trip on Wednesday, the school Spelling Bee on Thursday. Another busy week ahead!
So here we are in May. Wow. Soon your children will be in Grade 4. Isn’t that incredible? Your children have grown so much this year. On second thought, maybe I’ll just keep them all for another year of Grade 3. 🙂
We had a good start to the week today though it did start with some bad news. We found out today that Mrs. Davies’ brother-in-law was involved in an accident involving heavy machinery and passed away leaving her sister-in-law with 5 children and another on the way. We prayed for her and the family this morning and it would be wonderful if you would pray for them as well.
Lots of news this week. Read below to see what’s coming up and help you prepare.
Tomatoes in Space
Our tomatoes are growing well and several more came up over the weekend. I have taken a picture of both groups which you can see below. It has been tough deciding which group has the seeds that have been in space. We won’t actually know which seeds were which until we send in our results.The students have been making their observations everyday. It has actually been a nice addition to our space unit as students get to see plants growing right from the seed. We will be continuing on with the experiment for another couple of weeks until we are sure all the seeds have had a chance to germinate. The first one is Seed A followed by Seed B.
Here is the link to the activities on Spelling City:
Spelling Bee
Students also got their words for the annual Spelling Bee hosted here at Highroad Academy. The Spelling Bee will be held on May 14th with the primary classes competing after lunch at 1:00 running until 3:00. It should be a lot of fun. To prepare, every student has received a list of words that will be used for the competition. Only 5 students will be selected per class. To select the students, we will be holding our own Spelling Bee the morning of May 12th. If you don’t see the words in your child’s backpack, please let me know. There is also a parent letter that came with it. You can download the letter in the Box.net box to the right or by clicking spelling-bee-newsletter.
Planetarium Field Trip
Students will be going to the Vancouver Planetarium on May 13th. The permission form will be going home tomorrow or you can get your copy from the Box.net box on the right hand side. We will need volunteers. The bus will not be as crowded this time as it is just our class going! I promise! A big thank you to the parents who joined us for the last field trip. It was wonderful to see so many of you and have all those extra hands helping out!
Memory Verse
Our memory verse this week comes from Hebrews 11:1-
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
Wait there’s more!!!!!
Poetry
For our poetry unit, students have been competing in a Poetry Tournament over the last couple of days. Two students choose a poem to take home and practice. The next day, the two students read their poems out load to the class. Students vote for their favorite poem. The results are being recorded on our tournament bracket on the wall. I am also looking for a way to display the data on the website. Anyway, one of the other things we are doing is recording the poems for the blog. So here are the poems that have been done already.
With all the stuff happening lately, we have missed our chances to do our memory verse on both Friday and Monday (today). My apologizes and we will try to get back to a regular schedule for the memory verses. That said, we will do last weeks memory verse tomorrow. The memory verse for this week, which we will do on Friday is from Jeremiah 29:11:
We had a nice surge of users on Spelling City last week. Keep it up and remember, the Spelling City has lots of other great resources including games and printable handwriting practice with the spelling words for the week.
It has been a couple of very busy weeks recently. The students have been working hard and we are now just putting the finishing pieces onto our Daily 3 Language Arts Program. It has been a long process but the modeling and all the work that went into setting it and getting the students comfortable with the process is paying off. We started the last piece. “
So with the addition of the “
Monday was a great day!!! The students are having a lot of fun but are also able to get right down to work when we need to get stuff done. Our Daily 3 reading program is really going well and students have made it to 21 mins with non-stop reading!!!
