Month: January 2013

3E’s Inquiry Museum Info-Written by the entire class

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges ,

This week we had our Inquiry Museum.  Inquiry is when you study something and become an expert on it.  Everybody studied their own topic.  At the museum it was really fun to talk about our subjects and teach people about our topics.  We got to spread our information around.  A lot of people studied animals, but we also had a good variety of topics.  It was good to see our families learn about things they did not know before.  Some people taught us more about our topics when they came to talk to us and ask us questions.  It was really fun teaching people information they did not know.  We did not think kids could teach grown-ups, but we did!

Here are the topics we chose to study and some of the interesting information we learned:

Collin – It was really interesting to learn about Pocket Bikes and spread the information around. They are small, but they can go fast.  Ellie – It was fun to learn about lightning and hear people say they did not know that lightning occurs inside an active volcano. Elijah – I liked learning about dogs and teach people about dew claws. Joe – I think it was fun to learn about skunks because I never know they could swim or that they could run nine miles per hour. Daniel – It was fun learning about the army and that German Shepherds are mostly used as Army dogs.  Catherine – It was fun to learn about chinchillas.  I learned they have to take one or two dust baths a week.

Ella – It was fun to spread figure skating around. People did not know Michelle Kwan won the Olympics. Naish – It was fun to hear people say they were interested in learning a lot about snowboarding. The founder of snowboarding was Sherman Poppins.  The first snowboarder ever made was called a snurfer. Ella – It was fun teaching people about leopards and that leopards walk on their tip toes. Garrett – It was fun to let people know what happened to Abraham Lincoln a long time ago and to remind them what a good president he was. Caroline – It was fun teaching people about owls. Some people were shocked that the wing span of a Great Grey Owl was bigger than Mrs. Eaves. Trevor – I thought it was fun learning about blob fish. The question I got most was “Where did you find out about them?” My answer was that I learning about them in The Ultimate Weird but True book.

Julia – It was fun letting people learn about jaguars. The question I got most often was, “where do they live?” I told them jaguars live in South America in the Amazon rainforest. Brandon-It was fun learning about German Sheperds. There were a lot of facts about them. Questions I got included “When were they found?” “Who made the breed?” “Why I wanted to learn about German Shepherds?” They are really smart and brave and strong and I am German so I always wanted one since I was a baby. Gabby-I liked teaching people about Sunday River. The person who started Sunday River was climbing up it when he thought of creating a ski slope. His name was Tom Thurston. Sam-I liked teaching people about the wold populations. Calvin-I thought it was fun teaching people about macaws. An interesting fact is that they are at least three feet tall. Brandon M-It was fun learning about wild cats.  What surprised me was the lion had the loudest roar. You can hear a lion roar up to five miles. Noah-It was interesting learning about lemurs because I never knew much about them before. My favorite lemurs are the mouse lemur and the flying lemur.

We had so much fun at the museum we hope to do it again.  There will be new topics. We have to get used to presenting. There will be more information, different things, and some people might learn new animals and stuff.

Our Week – January 18

Mrs. Eaves Weekly Newsletters

Isn’t it amazing that we are half way through the month and half way through the school year? Today was our 90th day of school. Your children are working on many different things – though deserve to be proud of their collective efforts.
Individually, I have to say many of the children could work on responsibility for best effort in neat, complete work as well as cleaning up after themselves and being respectful of our supplies and materials. Any gentle reminders about that lack of maid service and unlimited supplies would be appreciated. We have nothing to waste at our school and need to thoughtfully use what we have so we are able to accomplish wall we’d like in the complete school year.

3E’s Inquiry Museum
6:15 – 7:15 pm – Thursday, January 24

The children have been working diligently to create the displays for our museum. They have been writing up the facts they feel are most important to share and working to find ways to explain their understanding. Before you enter the museum please take time to read the letters and notes on the museum sign. They are intended to let you know some of what you may want to find out. There are display announcements, business cards and questions you can expect to find answers for as you tour the exhibits. The children are hoping you will ask them questions because they know more than their displays show. They have worked to become experts and are eager to share their interests with everyone.


I think you will smile to see what “being an expert” means to them – it is far different than what you or I are thinking. I have learned by helping the children move through this research project how different their understanding is than in years past. Generally the children would not copy a book – they can see the author’s name and recognize that as taking from another. They, however, have no problem copying from the Internet and claiming it is their own. It seem free for the taking to them. They know how to drag and drop. They know how to take screen shots. We have talked about this and used several different examples, but you will notice that many of the children have developed some very sophisticated sentences structures in their writing and a new vocabulary for their displays.
I will address this through the project’s assessment process to help the children understand what is acceptable use and what is not. Our next content exploration is Space. During this study the children will have a second opportunity to research and present their findings. Research and informational writing is something your child will do a great deal of in the second part of the year. I am looking forward to seeing how they develop, learn and grow. The museum will be a fun place to learn and explore.

Spelling Well and Using Writing Conventions

The children are taking more responsibility to slow down and spell well. They are more likely to use resources and check their work. I have noticed that some of them are working to remove their habits of capital letters in the middle of word or to notice a sight word that is often incorrect. They are becoming more aware that they must be aware of their habits in order to correct them.
The children are also learning more and more about sentences. “Sentence” is an abstract concept when you stop to think about it. Here are just a few of the words that come into play in order to consciously and purposefully write sentences well: nouns and verbs, something or someone doing something, simple, complex, compound, statement, question, exclamation, interrogative, and interjection to name a few. When we, as adults, use the word “sentence” a piece of some of these things come to mind. We took years to piece this understanding together – your children will too. I am pleased to notice in just a few weeks more of the children are thinking of punctuation and making an effort to use end marks for sentences, commas in lists and quotation marks to indicate conversation. Please talk to your child about what they know and what they are working to do. Noticing when you see punctuation in their work and gentle reminders every once in a while will go a long way in encouraging them to use what they know. Practice will extend their understanding too. Thank you for your help with this.

Book Clubs – developing a plan to record comprehension

This week we began book clubs. There are two main goals for this work. The first is to have conversations about books and reading in small groups. The class will learn to use the Open Forum format for discussion to deepen understanding. The second goal is to help each of the children become aware of different strategies they can use to develop their comprehension. This builds on the work we have begun in responding to our chapter read – aloud, Wildwood. We will learn what helps develop understanding and what distracts. I am finding a group of children who begin to add so much personal detail based on a connections to the text that they actually distract themselves and do not understand well. For example the story was about going on a vacation and arriving to find the cottage extremely run down. The paint was peeling and the porch was falling away from the building. It was clearly old. The students held on to the old part of the description and decided that the story was about a vacation at grandpa’s and because it was with old grandpa, it was really fun. The connection was made but it distracted from understanding. The vacation was actually to the beach, there was no grandpa and the old cottage was just the beginning of a string of bad events that ended in a wish for a better vacation next year.
We’ll be working with monitoring for meaning, visualizing, questioning and verifying, predicting and inferring. The books clubs will be a great place for the children to practice and come to understand what readers need to do.


Bits and Pieces –
• Star Gazing – February 11 at 6:30 pm – weather permitting. This is part of our space study. More details will follow.
• Cans of Beans for the 100th day of school – the goal is to have at least 100 cans here at school by January 30th. If we all bring in two cans, we’ll easily reach our goal and support a great community service. Thank you.

Our Week – January 11

Mrs. Eaves Weekly Newsletters

Our weeks in the classroom fly by – it is amazing to me when Thursday comes along.  It feels as though we have done so much but se still have so much to accomplish and, of course by then, time is running out.  This week was full of multiplication, our numbers of the week routine, cursive, developing plans to achieve our goals, reading, writing, research and inquiry projects

3 E’s Inquiry Museum

            Thank you for setting aside time on Thursday, January 24 to come to our museum from 6:15 to 7:15.  The children are quite excited about their projects and what they have been researching.  They have worked through quite a process and now are in the creation phase of the work.  It is interesting to see how each of the children approaches the research process to becoming an expert.  Some of them have really taken up that challenge.  They have read widely and worked to develop their own way of sharing what they have learned.  Others have copied a great deal of information and are working to put those pieces together.  They are now realizing they have to find their own words in order to teach others what they know.  They are discovering how important it is to understand rather than to have pages of information written down.  Still other children have lots of pictures and are now realizing they have some reading to do so what they are guessing from the pictures is actually true.  You’ll enjoy seeing the variety and uniqueness of each learner.  This first research presentation is a steep learning curve because so much of it is new and they have been working to do as much as possible independently.

Now they are considering how to share what they know in display that will make you want to stop and talk to them.  They are considering how neatness and eye-appeal will matter. They are thinking about accuracy and planning as well.  They seem very excited about what they have to share and are looking forward to having the opportunity to teach others about their interests and learning explorations.

Spelling Well

            Part of our conversation about the presentation has been about how spelling, punctuation and neatness really matter.  The class is thinking more and more about their spelling in daily use.  We are working to eliminate capital letters where they do not belong and put them where they do so that words are spelled correctly in that way.  And we are working to pay attention to our daily written work so that we notice and fix a few bad habits.  We are trying to keep things like “whent”,“dose”  and “isent” from happening when we really mean went, does and isn’t.

Last week we discovered that in general we spell 82% of the most common word correctly.  We would like to raise that to 100% and we’d like to spell all of what we write with at least 95% accuracy.  We talked about learning and growing and trying new words to stretch in that way too so we are not thinking we’d be perfect spellers in our first draft work.  We want to try new fancy words too.  We also discovered that we only use punctuation and capital letters about half of the time.  We know we could use them all of the time if we tried to remember so we are working on that too.

This week we finally worked on our third group of cursive letters – the loop group.  We hope to know all of the lower case letters by the end of February and then we’ll see what we can write using those letters.

Multiplication Arrays

            We know that arrays always have to be rectangular.  We know that the area of the rectangle can be discovered by knowing the height times the length.  We’ve noticed that there are many different ways to arrange 12, 24 or 36 tiles. We know that multiplication isn’t hard to understand and knowing the facts is important – larger sets are just too many to count.

Silent Maze Challenge

            This week our challenge involved concentration, observation, cooperation and self-control.  The children had to work together and learn from one another’s mistakes in order to accomplish the challenge.  We noticed that there was such a thing as too much silliness – it might be funny, but it doesn’t get the job done.  That lead us back to our habits for success – grit, self-control, social intelligence and optimism all played a role in our ability to accomplish the goal.  Adding personal flares here and there contributed the zest.  We are noticing how the habits for success impact almost everything we do.

 

Bits and Pieces –

  • The 100th day of school is 17 days away.  The school is going to collect food items for the Portsmouth Food Pantry.  Grade 3 is collecting canned beans – they didn’t specify so we are thinking any and all will be greatly appreciated.  If every child brings in a can or two we will have our 100 collection in a trice.
  • Ask your children what is happening in Wildwood – the action is pretty amazing.  The class was finding it hard to believe that adults would act as dishonestly as some of the characters in Wildwood do.

The photographs for our post were taken by classroom photographers: Elijah, Julia, Joe, and Garrett

We’d love to know what you think of our work and the way we share our classroom with you.

Our Week – January 4

Mrs. Eaves Weekly Newsletters

Happy New Year!

I hope you have an enjoyable time with your families – reflexed or action packed as you like it.  It was great to be back – glad for the shorter week at first so we could get back into the swing and ready to go.

Revisiting Goals – Making Resolutions

This week we used a quote from Antione de Saint-Exupery:  “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” to renew our conversation about learning goals.  The children reexamined their goals from the fall – they could decide to keep them or change them.  Once they had decided on the 2 or 3 things they would like to work on at school, the job was to make a plan.  We will continue to work on this and add in ways to look for progress over time as a way to provide evidence that the goal has achieved.

As a class we are making spelling a priority.  The first part of our goal is to work on spelling all the first three hundred most frequently written words accurately.  We are going to track this progress with class percentages and identifying personal demons.  We are developing individual dictionaries and will begin word study groups to focus on areas of need.

Sets and Arrays

            We began our study of multiplication by learning two different activities:  Circles and Stars (many of you found that in the homework folders) and How Many?  How Long?  The first activity helps children develop an understanding of multiplication as a process of finding the combined total of like sets.  It adds to their understanding of skip counting.  The second activity is done with Cuisinairre Rods – these are math manipulatives with values from 1 to 10 – each value is a different color.  The children roll a di – once to see how many rods they will take and a second time to see how long the rods will be.  Next they create an array with those.  The game comes in competing to see which player will be able to claim more of the area of a 10X10 grid.  Both activities are fun and clear ways for children to understand what the process of multiplication is and how the operation is represented mathematically.

Bits and Pieces –

  • We are nearly half way through Wildwood , our class read-aloud.
  • The children feel that they will be ready to share their expertise at a class museum in the 3rd week of January.  The plan would be to hold the museum from 6:15 to 7:15 in the evening either Wednesday or Thursday evening.  Be on the look out for that invitation.
  • As always – please check out our blog:  3enews@edublogs.org  Student posts are coming soon –and the pictures add so much more.

Happy Weekend!

this post is illustrated with photographs taken by Brandon and Ella