We had a lot of fun today writing poetry, and we are getting excited for you to come to hear us perform our own verbal works of art at our Poetry Slam on December 18th from 9:20-10:50.

Next week we will be taking a test on healthy eating and digestion.  We will be continuing our expoloration of early Pacific Northwest cultures.  We will be reading and writing poems.  We are also going to continue working on visualizing story problems. 

Today for reading we read a non-fiction article about a new exhibit coming to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. The exhibit features Native American art that was inspired by horses.  Tomorrow we will be writing poems about how horses affected Native American culture, and we will be using alliteration in the poetry we write. 

We also read a Pacific Northwest Native American legend of how the Seven Devils and Hell's Canyon came to be. 

In math we are working on our bar modeling.  Parent math night is going to be on December 12th from 6:00pm to 7:00pm, and we will be splitting into groups.  Mrs. Walle and I will be there to teach the parents of the 3nd and 3rd graders all about bar modeling. 

I am so proud of the way this class has returned from break ready to learn.

Today in writing we started practicing character development.  We are developing interesting characters that we might use later to write a fantasy story.  Developing our own characters for future stories will be very helpful to us later when we start our reading unit on fiction texts.  This winter in reading we will be learning about personality traits and physical characteristics, and using that information to help us make predictions and inferences to better understand a story.

Poetry Slam!
We will be having a Poetry Slam on December 18th.  Please come and join us while we read the poems we've been writing.  The Slam will begin at 9:20 am and go until 10:50 am.  Please do not feel the need to bring anything other than your support.  Details are included in the Tuesday folder.  Please R.S.V.P.

In math we are working on visualizing story problems.

In social studies we are learning about the environment that Early Northwest Coastal People lived in and how it affected their culture.

Welcome back!

Today we started talking about onomatopoeias.  We did some solid prewriting for our new onomatopoeia poems, and tomorrow we will start drafting them.

In math we took a pretest on bar modeling.  The important thing to remember about bar modeling is that it is a way to visualize a story problem and to keep track of your thinking.  I love bar models!

We started learning about Native Americans today.  We are going to be running our own village of Early Northwest Coastal People.  Tomorrow we will build the environment that our village is in.

    In reading this week we talked about making text-to-self and text-to-text connections in poems.  We are still writing our poems as well.
    For math we are working on visualizing story problems.  This is the beginning of our work with bar models.  This link will take you to a copy of the story problem that we solved today: http://www.worksheetworks.com/pdf/6e1/1218280d47e/WorksheetWorks_Drainpipe_Dreams_2.pdf  This problem is a good example of math being much easier when we make a picture of the problem first.

    Happy Friday!  Today we learned what a thesaurus is, and how to use one.  We applied that information to our poetry by writing synonym poems.  We wrote synonym poems by choosing an emotion, looking it up in the dictionary and finding a few synonyms for it.  We chose our favorites, and wrote them in as a line of poetry.  We then wrote a second line of poetry to tell the reader something that gives us that feeling.  We learned the words rhythm (the rhythm for this poem was iambic pentameter), rhyme, and couplet.  We wrote a few as a class before we went off to do our own.  Here is an example from the whole class:

Sad
Morose, sullen, dejected, and blue;
All because I've lost my shoe.

    We also spent some time talking about being proactive and how keeping a good attitude and being proactive can help you become a more successful person.

   We are continuing our work on poetry.  We learned about three types of poetry today.  Descriptive poems are the color poems we have been working on, and I also introduced narrative and concrete poems today.  We will be writing our own narrative and concrete poems to go along with our descriptive poems.  Hopefully by winter break we will have published books of poetry to share with you.
    We are going to take our subtraction with regrouping test on Friday.  Our next chapter is on bar models.  We will be starting that next week.  Bar models are a wonderful visualization to help us understand story problems.  They are especially handy with multi-step word problems.
    We are getting excited about seeing you at school during conference week!

    We had a wonderful day today.  We are working on understanding figurative language that poets use to help us find meaning and visualize their poem.  One of the things we are doing to help us understand is writing our own poems.  We are using poetry to describe our favorite color.  I am really impressed with some of the work these guys are producing.  Tomorrow we will be talking about three different types of poems: descriptive, narrative, and concrete.
    We are doing well in subtraction with regrouping, and we are close to ready to move on.
    In health today we learned a bit about our eyes.  We read about how to keep our eyes safe and healthy, as well as how our eyes work.  We did a couple of interesting experiments, and looked at some optical illusions. 
    We had a pretty great day!

    Today we started our unit on poetry.  We talked about metaphors, similes, and imagery.  We read a poem by Mary O'neil that describes the color gold.  We then wrote our own poems about color.  I was very impressed with some of the emotion this group of kiddos is putting into their writing, and I am even more excited about our poetry unit now. 
    We played a game called "Go for the Smallest" in math.  It was a lot of fun, and the game reinforces our subtractions with regrouping skills.
    We also put a lot of hard work in today on our personal narratives.  We are working on using interesting adjectives, and describing our emotions to make our personal narratives fun stories to read.

    Happy Friday!  I know that I haven't been keeping up with the blog as much as I was at the start of the year.  I apologize for the lack of communication of late.
    We are plugging away at subtraction with regrouping.  Right now a lot of us are finding it a struggle (which is okay), and we have a little extra time because we were so successful with addition, so we are slowing down a little and making sure we all have a solid understanding of how and why subtraction with regrouping works the way it works.
    Today we took the final test on our first unit of non-fiction.  We will be revisiting non-fiction texts throughout the year, and doing another unit on them later in the year in reading.  The new unit that we start next week is POETRY!!!  I am very excited about this unit!
    Have a wonderful weekend.