Cadet Pride and Books Coming Home

I hope you enjoyed your three day weekend with your family and friends. Mine was great except I would have loved it even more if it were a little warmer. Oh well... we can't be picky can we? :)

There has been a lot going on in 3B that I am excited to share with you. The students are into a super routine and working hard. Have they mentioned anything about Cadet Pride? Cadet Pride is showing that you are caring, respectful, responsible, and trustworthy. It involves all students K-8 working on appropriate behavior. When a student is caught demonstrating Cadet Pride, he/she is given a ticket to put in their class bucket. When the class gets 100 tickets, they get an ice cream party and extra recess. Well....we did it!!! We reached 100 tickets last week and had our ice cream party last Friday. The students were so excited and eager to have ice cream, with toppings of course! I was very proud of them as well. Now we have to set a new goal and decide what our reward will be. Great to see the students working so hard on demonstrating Cadet Pride everywhere in the building. Keep it up 3B!

Science is also a big hit as we have a "mystery object" in our classroom. Students made hypothesis on if the "mystery object" was a seed or an egg. They will find out today that it is called "brine shrimp". Pretty cool. Sadly, a lot of ours died over the weekend but we are able to view some on the internet as well as borrow some from another teacher. There will be more visitors arriving as part of our science unit on plants and animals....What will they be????

As a start to our day, the students are involved in a "Morning Meeting". The Morning Meeting revolves around four components: greeting, sharing, group activity, and morning message. I will be sending an informational note home about the different components. The main purpose of a morning meeting is to welcome everyone and let them know, and feel, like they are an important part of our class. It was the favorite part of the day with my class last year, and I can tell my 3B family this year is enjoying it. Today we did a greeting called "Shoe Greeting". Ask your 3B child about it and see what they say.

Some students have been asking about when they will be taking books home to read. I told them I would go over that this week. There are so many routines and things to cover that we did not get checking books out for home. We will this week. Today we made it to 23 minutes for our Read to Self stamina! That is great! I can tell I have a class or readers, which I am very excited to see.

I have also introduce a keyboarding website to the students that we will be using to build our keyboarding skills so the students eventually type a little faster. 3rd grade teachers are expected to introduce keyboarding so I found an online site to use. Some students have tried it at home, as I have introduced it and modeled it in the classroom. If your child wants to give it a try at home, the site is http://www.freetypinggame.net. Remind them to put their eyes on the screen, fingers in the home row, and try not to look at fingers. They are so excited to try it and I love their eagerness!

Enjoy your week. Hopefully summer isn't quite over yet!

New Week, New Activities, New News

I hope everyone had a great weekend! It was a nice weekend to kick back and relax. The kids usually come back on a Monday a little tired, but that was not the situation today. The students came in anxious and ready - and a little chatty. But we worked through it. The hardest part of the first few weeks of school is building the routine and stamina that will come into play the rest of the year. Currently, with our Daily 5 in literacy, we have made our "Read to Self" stamina up to 11 minutes! Yippee! We started "Read to Someone" today and that was a little more challenging, so we will continue to build that stamina as well. The other three components of the Daily 5 are Work on Writing, Word Works, and Listen to Reading. We should be through all five in the next few weeks and set for the year continually building our stamina in all areas. The Daily 5 replaces the traditional "centers" your child may have done in kindergarten, first, and second grade. I will also be doing Dibels assessments this week which involve students reading for a minute and retelling their reading. This assessment is done three times a year.
We have also thrown in a new part of our Morning Meeting and that is "sharing". Students are assigned a day of the week in which they can share something. Classmates can then raise their hands to ask questions about the sharing and encourage discussion. Again the purpose being to create a classroom community. The students seem to enjoy and benefit from the Morning Meeting, as do I.
So, as you can see, every thing is going very well. Be sure to check the daily blog that the students post. We'd love to have more followers and comments! Thank you also for checking my blog, which would love to have more followers also. Have a great week! Oh yeah, thank you to those parents who sent snacks. Our tummies than you also!