Amelia Bedelia

Friday, February 17, 2017

Once again the heart-warming character, Amelia Bedelia, was a huge hit with our third-grade students this year.  Amelia Bedelia and her stories were the perfect resource in helping our students to analyze a character, determine the meanings of idioms and homonyms, compare and contrast plot events, and write an opinion essay.

In this blog, we will share two of our highly engaging activities with you.

After reading and discussing Amelia Bedelia, Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping, and Come Back, Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish, we introduced our students to how to analyze a character's traits.  We emphasized the difference between a character's traits and a character's feelings.  Here is a link to a PowToon video that effectively explains this concept.

Our students then read a variety of Amelia Bedelia books during reading workshop.  As they read, the students completed a Character Analysis/Character Trait web created by Irene Fountas and  Gay Su Pinnel.  They were asked to determine one character trait of Amelia Bedelia, as well as write evidence from the story that supports it, for each book read.

Once the students began to know Amelia Bedelia on a deeper level, we asked them to use Comic Life 2 to create a situation where Amelia Bedelia is confusing multiple meaning words.  They had to take the perspective of Amelia Bedelia and the other character(s) involved.  This activity also required the students to understand two or three meanings of a homonym.  The students had a ball!  We could not believe how creative they could be their first time on Comic Life!

The second activity involved students in making a character trait slide show.  They used Google Slides and their character analysis web to demonstrate their understanding of how to identify character traits.  They were so motivated and engaged in this activity that they did not want to stop. They worked for over an hour!

This is just one slide out of 5!

This is one of the first of several slides.

This is an introduction page that includes the students' opinion of Amelia Bedelia.

Next week we will wrap up the Amelia Bedelia unit by writing our opinions to the question, Would you like to work with Amelia Bedelia? We will also complete a Venn diagram and write a compare/contrast paragraph about two of the Amelia Bedelia books we read.

We hope you are experiencing the same unusual spring-like weather we are having here in Lombard, Illinois.  It really is invigorating.

Until next time,
Kim and Anne

The Writing Party

January 21, 2017

What's a great way to get students excited about writing? Have a writing party, of course! After a trimester and more of direct writing instruction on the three main genres of opinion, expository, and narrative, with a little poetry thrown in for good luck, we felt it was time for the students to branch out on their own and begin to apply what they have learned on topics of their choice. Waiting this long to begin writer's workshop was new for us, and we kind of came upon it accidentally, however, we feel it is very serendipitous because the students are armed with skills and are not aimlessly writing and rambling on with no purpose. Hence, the kick-off to our writing party.

The kids were ecstatic when we gave them special writing notebooks and a goodie bag filled with writing supplies. Our first lesson was beginning to establish guidelines for Writer's Workshop. We charted our purpose for why we do Writer's Workshop and then listed what it should look like and sound like when we are writing.

We also read Rocket Writes a Story by Tad Hills. We noticed how it was difficult for Rocket to come up with an idea to write about, and we discussed ways that authors get their ideas. We then took time to brainstorm our Top Ten Most Memorable Moments to begin our own ideas list. The kids were given fifteen minutes to write about one of their memorable moments. They loved it and didn't want to stop. We may have created a monster, because all that the kids want to do now is Writing Workshop.

But, we had another special surprise for them. On the internet we found a cute pencil snack made of string cheese, Bugels, bubblegum, and frosting. You can find the directions for making this here.

On Monday, the kids are going to decorate their special notebook. Below is the letter we sent home asking parents to send supplies for this.

Everyone is anxiously awaiting Monday for this event! Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

The Wish Tree

January 1, 2017

Happy New Year!  We are excited to discover the new inspirations, knowledge, and opportunities 2017 will bring us.  So, we want to begin the new year in our classrooms becoming mindful and focused on our goals and desires.  Last month we found the book titled The Wish Tree by Kyo Maclear.  It is about a boy named Charles who sets out, with his sled named Boggan, to find a wish tree.  He encounters many animals working in the forest and he decides to help them.  Soon Charles is too tired to go on, and he falls asleep in the snow.  When he wakes up he sees his wish tree, and he writes his wish on a card and hangs it on the tree.  As the story ends, the reader recognizes that Charles' wish did come true, but they must infer what it was.  How clever of the author.

To follow this book up with our own wishes for the new year, we are going to make a wish tree and hang our wishes on it.  This wish tree is very simple and easy to make.  Here is a second link to a tree that looks more like the tree in the book, but it does not seem as simple to make.

We are looking forward to reading this meaningful story to our students and helping them to reflect on the author's message.  Focusing on their goals and wishes for the new year will hopefully bring them many successes in 2017.

Kim and Anne

Science Leads To Writing

Sunday, October 2, 2016

We love kicking off the school year with science activities that lead the students through the scientific method. Steve Spangler is a great resource for us. His science ideas are always a big hit with our classes.

Our first activity involved water cubes. The students were presented with the question: What will happen when we put the cube in distilled water? They were amazed at the results. The water cubes grew to over 200 times their sizes! This activity led to other extension activities, such as, What will happen if we put them in colored water? What will happen if we stack the colored cubes in a test tube? By this time our kids were hooked into science and began asking their own questions about the cubes. Some of their questions included: Will they grow if we put them in salt water? What will happen if we put them in Coke? What will happen if we freeze them? They were using the scientific method independently to find their answers.

Our next activity involved cabbage juice, driveway salt, and baking soda. Our question was: What will happen if we mix these three ingredients. We first mixed the salt and the baking soda. Nothing happened. Then, we poured the cabbage juice into the sealed bag. The chemical reaction astonished the kids!

In the meantime, we have been reading a biography on the famous scientist Albert Einstein. Our students are fascinated by the information they are gleaning from this book. They want to read more information on their own about him.

With all of this background knowledge we armed our students with, and their interests, we felt that they were ready to write about what scientists do. They found a science sticker scene from Oriental Trade, and the students created their own lab scene. One student exclaimed, "I never knew that stickers could be so interesting. I thought they were just for little kids!" We explained to the students that the first part of the writing process is brainstorming our ideas, and possibly getting more information. The students read through a PowerPoint about what scientists do, and took notes. Tomorrow morning we are going to talk about the trait of organization, and how we are going to elaborate the details of our notes into an explanatory paragraph.

picture

Next week we will share our finished product of our writing, and our Albert Einstein project.

Kim and Anne

Fireflies

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Fireflies. Is catching fireflies a special childhood memory? It will be for our students in Lombard. They absolutely love catching fireflies, so we though they would enjoy the poem, "Fireflies," by Paul Fleischmann. This is a poem for two voices. It is not only challenging to read, it is also challenging to understand, which is exactly what we wanted. The purpose of this lesson was for the students to practice using the questioning strategy that good readers use.

We had to first teach the kids how to read this poem with a partner. After they got the hang of reading it with their partner, they then slowed their reading down and began to record the questions that they had. Because it was such a complex text, they had many questions, mainly about the vocabulary. After that, as a whole group, we close read the poem to try to answer our questions. In doing so, we started to figure out why the author used certain words, and why he placed them where he did. We also inferred how the author himself felt about fireflies. He felt like they were artists, and that's why personified them in this poem. Our discussion led to much more than just answering our questions. It was a great, deep lesson. We got the kids thinking about more than the surface level meaning of the poem.

Click here to download this poem.  You can download it even though it will say Woops! There was a problem downloading this document.  That warning comes up because I typed this poem in pages.  The cricket poem is also here.  Anne and I used that poem to model the questioning strategy.

We had planned for that to be all we did with this poem, but Kim came up with a great idea. We decided to have the students write their own review of this poem. We first showed them examples from Spaghetti Book Club of other students' reviews. We noticed that a review would need a summary of the text, our opinion of it, and finally our recommendation. We added the quick, but fun, art project to make some fireflies to go along with our reviews.

Visualization was the next strategy that we worked on. We introduced this strategy with our students using the book, Fireflies, by Judy Brinckloe. We didn't want the students to see the pictures, so we typed the story up. As we read the story, we stopped periodically to discuss our visualizations. Then we showed them the pictures. The students naturally used other strategies while we were reading. They made text to text connections, and asked questions.

Are you now in the mood to catch fireflies?  Hurry up and catch some tonight before it gets too cold.  Just remember to let them go just like the boy in Fireflies did!

Kim and Anne

Exploring the World of Third Grade

Friday, September 9, 2016

Well, it's back to school for us, and we are off and running.  This year we mixed things up and had a brand-new back to school theme that is going to tie into our new social studies unit we planned this summer.  We created a unit on North American explorers, that we are super excited to teach, so we invited our students to come and explore the world of third grade with us.

A few days before school started the students received their Welcome Back letter which was printed on scroll paper.

We found the cutest explorer clip art on TeachersPayTeachers that we used to decorate the door of our classroom.  On a map of the world clip art, we printed the students names.  The door is more adorable than we thought it would be.

When the students came into the classroom on Meet The Teacher day, they found on their desk a plastic safari hat from Oriental Trade along with a squishy globe ball.  Our message to them was, "Put on your hats and let's have fun exploring third grade."  The kids were extremely excited and it was a great way to kick off the year.  Little did we know that our theme closely matched our Madison School theme, which is Madison School...Our Passport To The World.  That was icing on the cake!

We can't wait to share the lessons and ideas from our new explorer unit.  It's short, but sweet!

Have a great weekend.

Kim and Anne

Onomatopoeia Poetry

Tuesday, August 3, 2016

Throughout this past school year, our kids got a kick out of using figurative language. They especially enjoyed hyperbole and onomatopoeia words. When we have taught onomatopoeia words, we have usually used the book, Slop Goes the Soup: A Noisy Warthog Word Book by Pamela Duncan Edwards.

After reading this book, we used it as a  mentor text and had students follow the pattern to write their own sentence with an onomatopoeia word. This year, we upped the ante. We read aloud the book, The Rain Stomper by Addie Boswell. This was a little "meatier" story, and the kids loved it.

Then, we looked for a more challenging writing lesson. We found it on the site called LessonThis. This link was a great resource for the kids. It included an onomatopoeia word list, onomatopoeia books, a topic idea list, and a poem example. So, instead of just writing a sentence, we challenged our students to write a narrative poem using onomatopoeia words. It was hard, but it was the right amount of hard. They worked together and met the challenge head on. In fact, they were so enthusiastic about writing them, they asked if they could write more than one. Here are a few examples of the poems they wrote.

Enjoy the last few weeks of summer. School is right around the corner. We can't wait for it to start! We have been planning new and exciting lessons and  units all summer long and we are eager to try them out in our classrooms! We will share them with you throughout the year.

Kim and Anne