Saturday, December 10, 2011

Wells Fargo Banks!!

Our community service project will be coming to an end on Monday. Please have your child bring in their banks with all of the change they have collected. The banks are theirs to keep at home and enjoy. This community service project is the culmination of our money unit in both Imagine It and SS. The students will be counting the money that has been collected on Monday and Tuesday. We will present the money to a representative from the women's shelter at the end of this week. He will come in and accept the money from our students and then he will discuss with them how the money will be used, his career as a newscaster, and his work with the non-profit organization. He will explain to them the type of education that is needed to get a job in his field.

We will write thank you notes to the parent and Wells Fargo that donated the banks to our students. This will allow the students to practice writing friendly letters.

Thank you for your support in this worthy cause.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Midterm Reports

Parents:

Midterm reports came home today. Please sign and return these by tomorrow and your child will have no laps. If you have any questions about these grades or want to meet with me, please call me 980-343-3920 or email me jennifer.patrick@cms.k12.nc.us.

The fundraiser for the local women's shelter will end this Monday. Please send in any change you have collected in your Wells Fargo banks by this Monday. We are having a representative from the shelter come and receive the money from the students and talk about his exciting career. (He was once a newscaster in Charlotte.)

The heritage projects are due next Friday, December 16. Please remember they are to research the country of their heritage. They will not research a state or the United States, unless they are Native American. If you have any questions, please contact me.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Ted Turkey, Timed Test, and Thanksgiving

The Ted Turkey project is due tomorrow. Your child's five day journal will count for 75% of their grade. The other 25% is for their creativity in creating Ted's disguise. We will present these projects during our Imagine It class tomorrow. These will count for both a writing and SS grade.

We have taken our first two timed multiplication test and many of our students are not studying their math facts. It is their responsibility to try to memorize their math facts 0-12. I am teaching them the strategies of how to solve a multiplication problem, but they are still responsible for the memorization of these facts. I will give a timed test every Friday. These timed test help your child earn their ice cream party!!

Our Thanksgiving break begins on Wednesday. There will be no school on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I hope all of you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Monday, October 24, 2011

BOOSTERTHON!!!

Today was our Boosterthon Fun Run pep rally and we really got pumped up. We cheered, danced, sang, and some of us ran. The Boosterthon team got us excited for our upcoming fun run on November 4. We need as much parent and family support as possible. All students came home with their "Fun Run" booklet. On this booklet is a code that you can log in to funrun.com and get pledges from your family members. Make sure to log in tonight, so we can get the awesome reward of having the Boosterthon team with us during physical activity. There are a few rules that the students need to follow:
1. A pledge is a promise. If a person pledges this money, then they need to pay it after you have run your laps.
2. You may not ask teachers, other students, or strangers for pledges.
3. Have fun!

How does it work?

Ask Grandma, Grandpa, aunts, uncles, friends, and anyone else you know to make a pledge for every lap your child runs around the track. Let's say that grandma pledges $1.00 per lap run around the track and Sam runs 30 laps, then grandma would pay $30 at the end of the fun run. People can make their pledges directly to you or they can log-in on-line using your code. People can also pledge a flat amount if they would like, the money per lap just makes it fun for the kids.

Thank you for your support in this endeavor at our school.

**This will be our major fundraiser this year.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Testing, testing, and more testing!

I know it seems as if all we do sometimes is test our children, but these tests give me as the teacher valuable information to better help your child in our classroom. These tests inform me of what they have already learned and what I still need to teach or review with them. These tests also let me know what types of interventions I can do with your child to help enrich or re-teach these vital skills.

We also have to assess our students on a weekly basis in all subject areas. This testing allows me to understand which skills and standards I need to review and which ones we have mastered. I use these assessments to create my re-teach groups. I do not only assess with test, we also complete journals, graphic organizers, posters, group work, games, check-lists, self-assessments, and rubrics. I hope this helps you to understand the grades that are coming home better. You can also access all of your students grades through the on-line grading system.

Thank you for your continued support.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Curriculum Night!

Thank you for the great showing at curriculum night. I hope everyone had a good evening and enjoyed the presentation. We tried to make sure that everything we covered was pertinent to all third graders. We will be having another open house in February, where we will discuss EOGs and how to prepare your child.

We are continuing our Global Children's Challenge and we have gotten to travel to many interesting destinations. Make sure to check out our GCC site and see where all we have gotten to go. This project has been a blast. We will continue our study of other cultures by completing a heritage project about our own families culture.

Thank you for your continued support.

Monday, September 12, 2011

9-11 and Hurricanes

Our focus for the beginning of the school year in both science and social studies have been 9-11 and the 2011 hurricane season. I am trying to teach our students to be aware of things that are going on in other parts of the world that may affect us in some small way. We have been following and tracking the hurricanes this season and discussing the affects the hurricanes have had on the other parts of our country. We also discussed the ten year anniversary of 9-11, but I decided to put more emphasis on the hero aspect of this day. We look at the beautiful monument that they have made in New York to honor everyone that died that day. We wrote a reflection on a quote by president Obama and have created a grade level quilt. We wrote letters to a firefighter in New York showing our support and telling him how sorry we were for his loss. We also are writing reflections to discuss how we would feel if we were a hero. I have been very impressed with our students and how they have handled all of these discussions. Thank you for your continued support and ask your child about these issues we have discussed.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Welcome back!!

This is a blog site that I will use to update you on the daily happenings of our classroom. I will post each days lessons and remind you when we have tests and projects are due. I look forward to this school year with you and your children.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

IT WAS A BLAST!!

We had so much fun on Monday! We got to exchange Valentines, have a special breakfast treat, and enjoy ice cream sundaes. The students really seemed to enjoy the entire day. We also presented our robot projects, the kids were so creative in using the different geometric shapes to create their robots.

We are going to have a math patterns test this Friday. Please continue to work on the patterns with your children.

We will be beginning our study of the scientific process. The students will be creating their own experiments and then presenting them at the science fair on March 22nd. I hope to see you all there.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Game Day was a blast!!

We had so much fun this past Friday with our game day. The kids got to share in playing their games and dance around the room to fun music.

The students also created a rubric for their 3-D robot projects. Having them create a rubric allows them to take ownership for their project. We also did a test analysis on the geometry test that they took last week. This helped them to learn from the mistakes that they made. Most students realized just how many careless mistakes that they made. The re-test was a huge success, many of our classmates went from failing the first test to getting a perfect score on the second test. I recorded both tests in the grade book, so the two scores will average out together. I told them that we would be doing this test analysis on every single test for the rest of the year. Depending on how the class does on the test, I will then decide whether or not we will have a re-test.

I sent home my newsletter last week that had a list of all of the students in our class for our Valentines Day party. Please remember that we are combining our Valentines Day party with our multiplication ice cream celebration. We will be celebrating knowing our facts with Mrs. Elam's class.

The geometric robot projects are due on February 14th as well. I look forward to these projects every year. The students are so creative with all of the 3-D objects that they find to use on the robots. Please remember that you do not need to buy anything to create these robots. Many products and toys found in the home are 3-D shapes. They may ONLY use 3-D space figures to make their robots.

Enjoy this Superbowl Sunday! Good luck to both the Packers and Steelers.

Friday, January 28, 2011

What a fun day!

We had such a great day today at school. We began the day with a lesson on geometric shapes and the numbers of faces, edges, and vertices of each shape. Then we went to our AR celebration where everyone in our class received an award. I want to give special recognition to Thomas and Taniah for being our highest point and percent earners. We also celebrated in our classrooms by playing games and dancing.

We will have a math test on Tuesday of this week on our geometry concepts that we have studied. Please make sure that your child continues to study their multiplication facts.

Want something to talk about tonight at the dinner table? Why not discuss the 25th anniversary of the Challenger explosion? They have read the book "Ron's Big Mission" and can already give you a little bit of information about this time. Talk with them about the "Space Race" between us and Russia. What implications did this have for the United States at that time?

Have a great weekend and see you on Monday.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

No school tomorrow!!!

Parents there is no school tomorrow. It is a teacher work day. CMS has extended the nine weeks through January 25th. This is to make up for the snow days that we missed. This will give students the opportunity to turn in some assignments that they may have missed. Some points are always better than no points at all. We have started our geometry unit and are getting to use the SMART board software with this unit. It allows all of our lessons to be very interactive and helps to keep the students actively engaged.

It has been great seeing all of the constellation projects. The students did a good job putting these projects together and presenting them to the class.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

Today in class we celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We used the SMART Board Technology to complete a lesson on our LCD projector about his life and then we watched a video on Discovery Education about Dr. King's accomplishments. The students really enjoyed this lesson and many of them showed their enthusiasm by checking out books from the library about Dr. King's life.

We also reviewed for our test tomorrow on graphs and coordinate grids. Check out the website to see descriptions about these curriculum items.

We still have students that have not turned in their multiplication logs. If your child has lost their log, just write up a list of all the dates they studied their flash cards and which facts they studied on those days.

I am currently having PEP conferences for all of those students that are on a PEP. Please make sure that you sign up for a time to come in and speak with me about your child's progress.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Snow, Ice, and Freezing Rain!!!

I hope all of you enjoyed playing in the snow yesterday with your families. My son Kale got to go sledding for the first time yesterday and he had a blast. We went "Southern Sledding" as I like to call it, meaning we used a pool float to sled on. We had a small snow ball fight and then went inside for some "snow cream". It was a really nice day shared with my family. The make-up day for this snow day will be January 17th. We will be celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on this day.

Today I woke up to an icy wonderland outside. It was very difficult to even get down my stairs and walk the dogs. I hope all of you are staying safe and warm inside your homes. Take this day to get some work done on your constellation projects and extra credit planet projects. Remember that these projects are due on January 14th. We will have a multiplication timed test tomorrow, so make sure that you are studying your flash cards.

Take care and have another wonderful day off.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

The Phases of the Moon

One of my sons got a model of the moon that shows all of the phases of the moon for Christmas. I think I was more excited than he was about this gift, because I knew that I was going to bring it into school to show my students the phases of the moon. I brought it in yesterday and we watched as the moon lit up and the different phases were described on the CD as was the history of the moon. The students gave a lot of "cools" and "neat". It was good for them to get to see the phases and how they transitioned from one to the other. We have also started our moon observations in our observation log in the lap books. We began on January 4 with a New Moon cycle. They were able to see yesterday how it moved into a Waxing Crescent phase. We will continue to look at all of the cycles of the moon, so they can see the complete one month cycle.

The movie afternoon was a lot of fun. We did not get to finish the movie, however we will get those students together that paid for the movie next week and we will allow them finish. Thank you for your continued support.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Pictographs and More

Today in class we discussed pictographs and how to transfer the information from a tally mark graph to a pictograph. I also stressed that the most important thing of looking at a pictograph is paying attention to the key. The pictures in the pictograph typically represent more than one thing. A * might equal 5 on one graph and 10 on another. Students commonly make the mistake by only counting the stars as one and then they will get the answer wrong.

I was extremely proud of both groups today when we were completing our SOLVE problem. Both groups realized that they needed to both round and add, when they saw the key words "about" and "in all". I cheered for both groups because it is really setting in. We will continue to do one SOLVE problem everyday. This will help the students to review all concepts taught this school year and help them understand how to solve a word problem and look for the key words so that they will know whether to add, subtract, multiply, or divide. There is a SOLVE key word section in the FROG binder. Please let me know if you need another one.

Please remember that the multiplication logs are due on January 10th. The constellation projects are due on January 14th. If your child needs any materials to complete the constellation project, please let me know and I will help provide them.

We will be having PEP conferences soon. I will be sending home the conference sign-up sheets soon. I look forward to meeting with you.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Graphing and Project

Today I introduced tally mark and bar graphs. This is usually a pretty easy concept for most students. The biggest thing they have to remember is that the bottom line is always the x-axis and the left side line is always the y-axis. We discussed making sure that the graph has a title and that we label both the x and y-axis. We looked at how tally marks can be used to poll people to find out information. Today we discovered what our favorite snow day activities are; throwing snow balls won by a long shot. I personally chose reading a book by the fire.

I also assigned the constellation project to the students that will be due on January 14th. Please let me know if you need any help getting information for this project. I will help them find the information at school and send it home with them to complete their poster.

The students seemed really tired and sluggish today, hopefully they will perk up tomorrow!!

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Welcome back on January 3rd.

I hope that all of you had a wonderful and restful break. It is now time to get back to work. We will begin 2011 with a running start. We will continue our multiplication timed test through January 31st for our ice cream party, we will also take our addition and subtraction timed test throughout the school year. It is very important that all students master their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts before they leave third grade. Please continue to work on these flash cards with your students. The multiplication logs are due on January 10th. Many students have already turned these in. If you have completed the log with your child, go ahead and turn it in.

We will have a constellation project coming home on January 3rd, that will be due on January 14th. There will also be an extra credit planet project coming home on January 3rd and it will also be due on January 14th.

WE WILL GRADUATE IN 2020!! We have discussed this every day this school year. It is so important that our children understand the importance of graduating from high school and going on to study in higher education. We have researched the colleges we would like to attend and the careers we would like to have when we get older. We will be completing an extensive research project on our careers and colleges in the coming months.

Thank you for all of your support in 2010. I know that 2011 will bring many successes our way!!