Weekly Update

Grandparent & Special Person Day:
What a great time students had sharing the morning with their grandparents and other special guests on Thursday!  Our guests spent time doing some morning math work, listening to students read aloud favorite picture books in the library, eating breakfast in the LGI, and listening to students read aloud their country reports and informational books while they ate.  Back in the classroom, students interviewed their guests to learn more about what life was like when they were in third grade.  Students loving learning more about their guests and realized how much times have changed.  Check out TONS of great photos from our special day in the slideshow below.  To see larger versions of the photos, double click on any photo.

 

Reading & Writing Workshop:
We spent most of last week finishing up our informational books.  Students spent a great deal of time on this project and were so excited to finally publish their reports.  Both the graded rough drafts and the final books will be coming home this week for students to share with their parents.  We ask that (only) the final books be returned to school so that we can display them outside our classroom for other Hill students and staff to enjoy.

Math:
We continued Unit 6 in math: Geometry.  We focused mostly on quadrilaterals, which are polygons with 4 sides.  The quadrilaterals we have studied include rectangles, squares, parallelograms, rhombuses, and trapezoids.  Students practiced drawing different quadrilaterals that matched specific descriptions and describing the relationships among the various types of quadrilaterals.

Social Studies:
We began our tour of the Southwest Region this week.  Geographically, this is a large region, but it only has 4 states!  We are traveling on a big rig during this region.  Our first two stops were in Monument Valley, home of the Navajo Indian tribe, and Phoenix, Arizona, the hottest large city in America.

Star of the Week:
Gloria was our awesome All-Star of the Week!  On Monday, she loved showing her sharing sack items to her classmates, especially a special snow globe that she got from her grandma in Romania.  She also did a wonderful job reading her favorite book aloud with excellent fluency.  Her mom was her lunch buddy on Tuesday, but she was lucky to also see her mom and her grandpa again on Thursday for Grandparents Day!

Weekly Update

Reading Workshop
We wrapped up our Informational Reading Unit this week.  Students worked together with their reading partner to study the pictures and text features of a subtopic within their text set.  Students also learned that readers recognize the text structure as they study a subtopic of interest to help them understand what they are reading and to teach others what they are learning.  Finally, students noticed how information on the same subtopic can be presented differently, and some texts provide more details than others.

Writing Workshop
Students wrote an "About the Author" blurb to include in their Informational Final Draft Booklets.  Students also began copying their Table of Contents, Headings, and Chapters into their Final Draft Booklets.  Their booklets will include illustrations as well as photographs printed from the computer lab.  Students are hoping to share their Informational Booklets with their special guest/s on Thursday!

Math
We began Unit 6 this week.  In this unit students will learn many different geometry concepts.  In the first lesson, we focused on the triangle.  Vocabulary words which were introduced or reviewed include: ray, angle, 90 degree angle, triangle, quadrilateral, polygon, concave, convex, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, and decagon.  Students learned to describe triangles by the types of angles each had.  Students also learned to describ triangles by the number of sides of equal length.  Finally we practiced naming various polygons and building polygons using triangles.

All-Star of the Week
Our spectacular All-Star last week was Madeline!  She had been looking forward to her special week for quite some time!  The class enjoyed her sharing sack items and her informational read aloud.  We were also impressed with the acrostic poem her family wrote about her.  Maddie enjoyed a special lunch with her dad on Tuesday as well!

Troy Fire Department Visits Hill
The Troy Fire Department visited first, third, and fifth grade classrooms on Thursday.  It's always a good review to hear important safety tips!  Please make sure you check the batteries in your smoke detectors at home.  Also, you should have a meeting spot as a family outside of your home in the case of a fire.  Check out a few photos below, which include pictures of our class crawling out of the "smokehouse" to avoid the smoke in the air.

Weekly Update

Reading Workshop:
In reading workshop, students are exploring text sets with their nonfiction reading partners.  Each partnership chose a set of 3-4 books on the same topic.  (Sets included frogs, snakes, whales, sharks, tornados, hurricanes, Jupiter, soccer, the moon, etc.)  Students predicted what type of subtopics they would find in their books, accessed their prior knowledge, and then began exploring the actual subtopics in each of the books.  They compared the texts to each other and picked one of the texts to explore more in depth.  Students practiced the skill of summarizing as they chose a single subtopic in their book and focused on finding the main idea and supporting details.  They wrote short summaries and shared them with the class.  We will continue to use the text sets this week to practice more reading skills.

Writing Workshop:
Students finished the rough drafts of their informational "expert" books.  Their books include a table of contents, an introduction, 4 chapters with information about each subtopic, and a closing.  Students used a detailed rubric to assess their own rough draft and turned it in to be assessed by the teacher.  We will be meeting with students this week to discuss revisions/improvements that students might need to make before beginning their final books.  Students will also be writing an "About the Author" section.

An example of a student's rough draft

Rough Draft Booklet Assessment Rubric

Math:
We finished Unit 5!  It was a challenging unit with different types of multi-step word problems.  Students took the final test on Thursday before the break.  Some students still need to finish part of the test, so you can expect to see the corrected test in your child's homework folder by the end of the week.

Social Studies:
We finished touring the Midwest Region before the break.  Students completed their travel journals and worked on adding the souvenirs they collected along the way to their region binder scrapbooks.  The final test will be on Tuesday, April 5th.


March is Reading Month (In Review):
We finished up our March is Reading Month activities the week before break.  Students were SO excited to reach not only the original "reading minute"goal that won them a pizza party but also the additional reading goal we set that earned them a "music" day.  The kids loved bringing in a variety of devices so that could listen to their favorite songs!

Mystery Readers:
We had our last mystery readers of the month visit our room and read some great books!

Grace & Maddie's Mom

Hemali's Sister

Mapping Our Reading Travels

On this map of the United States, students are now pinpointing the places where their books have taken them.  Each student has a different color tack on our map key. If a place in the U.S. is mentioned in a book they are reading, they get to add a tack to the location on the map!