News From 104!

Hello Families, 

We are settling back into our school world and enjoying the warmer days. It's great to see your amazing children again! Head over to Seesaw and check out our video on some things we did today, from sorting pictures of potential and kinetic energy, building robotic legos, writing to our pen pals in Virginia, reading TFK, to solving mysteries. We were busy!

It is always a busy time of year with spring sports, after school activities, and family fun, so I wanted to keep you updated on a few upcoming dates for our class. As always, please let me know if you have any questions. 

Upcoming Dates

Tuesday, May 8: Math MAP assessment (all third graders)

Wednesday, May 9th: Field Trip to Portland Museum of Art with Ms. Higgison (12:15-2:30)

Thursday, May 10

Tuesday, May 15th: Field Trip to Osher Map Library in Portland (9:50-12:15)

Monday, May 21: Costumes for Biography projects due in class (please let me know if you need help locating items).

Friday, May 25: Grandparents'/Special Friends' Day at YES. Biography Wax Museum for our third graders.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. Have a great weekend!

What's New?

Hello! 

Here is what we've been up to since we've returned from February break,

Reading:
The students have been immersed in reading biographies, choosing from a wide variety of important people who made great contributions to the world. We have been following the format of the "Somebody...Wanted...But...So...Then..."which helps the students identify what our subject wanted but what were the big struggles that were getting in the way. Also what they did to overcome those struggles and then what they did to further their dreams. Soon your child will pick one biography to focus on and "become" for our wax museum (more info soon)

Writing:

We have started our Opinion Writing Unit. The students chose to create their first task by writing an opinion piece to persuade me to get a class fish! So after reviewing their compelling reasons on how it would better our classroom environment and create more responsibility I have agreed. Fish will arrive on Monday, March 12th. What should we name him/her? Next, we've moved on to writing more opinion speeches to share our ideas (thesis) about problems and thinking of ways to find solutions. We will also write pieces that focus on our feelings about a special person, place or thing that might be noteworthy and that we want to share with the rest of the audience.

Science:

The Solar System will be our science focus for the next few weeks. So far we have been learning about the planets and their order. We've researched about each planet and wrote a Cinquain poem about our favorite planet. We'll post them on Seesaw soon. Soon we will learn about the phases of the moon!

Math:

Right now we are working on measurement, liquid volume ad fractions. We're currently posting on Seesaw some learning about fractions and reasoning. Be on the lookout! As always, we'll continue to strengthen our multiplication and division skills.

Important Events:

MEA Testing:

In the next few weeks we will begin our MEA testing. The testing will be administered Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for the weeks of March 19th and 26th. Prior to the testing we will have opportunities to practice sample questions on the iPads, as well as build in other test taking strategies.

March 16th: Wear GREEN to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and hopefully the coming of Spring soon:)

March 16th: Yarmouth's Got Talent! 

April 2-6th: Last year began our annual "YES Spirit Week" and it was a huge success.  This year will once again feature fun spirit week dress up days like "Inside-Out Day", "Yarmouth Clippers Day",  "Mismatch/Mix and Match Day" and "Hat Day".  Let's have some fun celebrating the arrival of spring! 

News from The Crew!

Hello Families,

We've been busy in room 104. A few dates to mark on your calendar; 
Monday, December 18th - 9:00-10:00 - A celebration of our learning this year (2017).
Tuesday, December 19th - 12:30-2:30 - Rock Climbing at YHS

Social Studies:

We are diving into geography and learning all about the 7 continents:  North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and Antarctica!!  There is a huge globe hanging from our classroom ceiling that we can reference during our geography lessons. We also explored different countries and reading about them. We have chosen a country to learn more about and we'll be doing an at home project on these countries. Please look for a letter sent by email and in your child's folder on Monday.

Reading:

We started our non-fiction unit.  This week we learned about nonfiction text features and the role they play while reading nonfiction.  Some non-fiction features are index, glossary, table of contents, captions, heading/subheadings, timelines, maps, diagrams, charts, and photographs! We also learned how to take notes with boxes and bullets and writing the gist (summary) of what we've read in our nonfiction books. A lot of new learning about many different topics.

Hour of Code:
This week is Computer Science Week with an Hour of Code! We had so much fun with Lightbot, The Foos, Scratch Jr. and Beebot. We might have some future coders in our classroom! To end our week of Coding we did a Breakout EDU.

Enjoy your weekend!

Mt. Apatite Farm

Hello Families!

What a week! What a storm! What a wonderful field trip we had! We were worried about the weather and pondered with the thought of canceling, and we're so glad we didn't. We had a wonderful time rock hounding! I hope your child shared with you the gems that they took home with them and were able to name some of the minerals they found. They are becoming very knowledgable of our Maine minerals. Also, a huge thank you to all of our parent volunteers! Enjoy the slideshow of our trip and have a great weekend!

Lights Out!

It was a stormy morning and the hallways and classrooms at YES were dark, but that didn't stop us from having fun ​and learning! Our classroom, or the Penthouse as Mr. Gleason likes to call it, had power and lights were on in Room 104​! We invited other 3rd graders to join us in making an array city during our math workshop today. Check out our​ video of all the fun we had and our final project.

Mystery Skype-Global Read Aloud

This week we connected with two classrooms to discuss the Global Read Aloud book Fenway and Hattie. On Tuesday we connected with a 3rd grade that was located in British Columbia, Canada. We enjoyed discussing out favorite parts of the book so far. Ask your child what their favorite part of Fenway and Hattie has been.

On Thursday, we made things a little bit more interesting! We mystery Skyped with a 3rd grade classroom in Missouri, but our students didn't know the location of each of the classrooms that we were connecting with. Therefore, it was a mystery Skype. Each classroom took turns asking each other yes or no questions and the first class to guess the correct state won...we lost, but we are confident we'll win the next time around!

Here is a slideshow of our Skype thanks to our classroom photographers, Silas and Emma...

Breaking Out and Global Read Aloud!

On Monday our class will be participating in the Global Read Aloud. The project was created in 2010 with a simple goal in mind; one book to connect the world. Now seven years later, they predict there will be more than 1,000,000 connections made in 60 different countries. Wow! And we are going to be one of those participants. Each week, for 6 weeks, we will connect with another classroom via Skype to discuss that week's chapters of the read aloud. The book we will be reading is Fenway and Hattie. We can't wait to share with you each week about our journey around the country with other classrooms reading the same book!

To kickoff the Global Read Aloud we did a Breakout EDU to go with the book Fenway and Hattie. What's a Breakout EDU? Breakout EDU activities are innovative games that teach critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, teamwork, and communication skills. These teams of students work together to solve clues and unlock a tightly locked box. Students will show perseverance, excitement and even frustration as they collaborate to breakout! These boxes were granted to the 3rd grade last year through a YEF grant. A huge thanks to the Yarmouth Education Foundation!

Here are a few pictures from our breakout:



Have a great weekend!