Projects and Challenges

Announcing … The Parade of the States

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges

This week the children will be choosing the state they will research and present at The Parade of the States. During the next week and a half, the children will be identifying the wonders from their state.  They’ll be choosing a state symbol to learn more about.  They’ll be identifying a famous person from their state, as well as choosing a man-made wonder, a natural wonder and a state festival, tradition or celebration.  Children may choose other Wonders if they would like to represent them on their floats.

These Wonders will be represented on the floats they will present in the Parade of the States.  Here are some samples of floats from past years to give you all some ideas.

The floats may be a sandwich board,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or on a wagon, rolling suitcase, cooler, skateboard or an original base.

 

 

 

 

Suggestions of how to build each type of float along with the following criteria and more detailed instructions will be sent home on Monday, April 13.

Size Criteria:

  • Sandwich Board/Float should be no more than 36 inches long.
  • Sandwich Board/Float should be no more than 48 inches high.
  • Sandwich Board/Float should be no more than 30 inches wide.

Design Criteria:

  • The float obviously represents your state and shows its uniqueness.
  • Clearly represents your, the student’s, own ideas, work and effort
  • Shows common easily found materials were used to create the float.
  • Clearly demonstrate your, the student’s, best effort and creativity.

Content Criteria:

  • Represent and label your Wonders on the sandwich board or float clearly and accurately.
  • It is a fun project and such an exciting celebration of our country and a year of learning!  We can’t wait to see you on Thursday, May 23!

Here Are This Week’s Blog Prompts

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges

We’ve been learning about seed parts, seeds, planting and growing.  This week be began a seed growing experiment in the classroom and began chard as part of our school-wide square foot gardening project.

About six weeks ago Sutton collected apple seeds from his lunch and planted them.  We have seven 4-inch apple tree seedlings in our classroom.  We’re going to see how they thrive in the nice warm greenhouse.  All our growing projects inspired us to share spring thought on our blogs.  Please leave a comment when you read them.  They are inspiring.

Spring

  • What is your favorite part of spring and why?
  • A fresh start at spring is a great time to…
  • If you could plant a garden of anything, what would be in it?
  • Tell your story of gardening
  • Tell the story of a magical garden
  • Write a poem about the flowers, gardens and new baby animals of spring
  • Other…

Thanks for reading.

Here Are This Week’s Blog Prompts

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges

We’re learning more about the world, and we’d like to do all we can to make it more peaceful.  Below you can see some of the books we’ve been reading to help give us different ideas.

Today while blogging, some of us finished posts on different topics, but some of us thought and wrote about peace.

  • What does peace mean?
  • Describe peace in five words. Explain why you chose those words.
  • How can you create peace in our world?
  • Write a story about a peaceful world?
  • What are three things you can take to be more peaceful?
  • Write a poem about the world where all the people stopped fighting.

It’s Blogging Wednesday

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges

This is the 3rd week of the Growth Mindset Read-Aloud project.  We’ve had some technology challenges in our classroom that wouldn’t allow us to connect with the video and the online conversation about After the Fall by Dan Santat.  After we read the book again – it’s one of our favorites, we realized accidents do always happen.  You can let worry about them keep you from what you love, or you can come up with a new idea and make a plan to overcome your fears.   It’s okay if that takes some time.

After we read After the Fall we each chose a picture book with a Growth Mindset message to summarize.   We read the books and wrote reviews to share what we could learned from them.  We shared how they help us learn more about the benefits of having a growth mindset.  Please read our individual blogs to find our book summaries.   We hope they inspire you to follow your dreams … even if the journey is an exhaustingly rough challenge.

 

 

Joining a Growth Mindset Project

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges

We are excited to join a Growth Mind Set Read Aloud Project developed by a teacher at the Louis Riel School Division in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Annick Rauch is the teacher of a 1/2 classroom in a French Immersion school.  We are looking forward to connecting with students in other places around the globe.  During the first week we read The Word Collector by Peter H Reynolds.  The class decided to answer the questions from the project by creating individual blog posts sharing their answers.

The questions are:

What thing do you like to collect?

What word could Jerome find to go into a “Growth Mindset” scrapbook?

What are good ways to use your words?

Jerome is Word Smart and he shares it with the world.  What are some of your smarts?  What talents do you share in your classroom?

How will you make the world better?

Go to each of their individual blogs to read how these questions were answered from week 1 on the four week challenge.

Fractions and Music

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges

We’ve begun to learn about fractions in math class, but the concept becomes even clearer when we’re learning how to read and write music with Mrs. Oliver.  Here are some of our first rhythms showing which fractions are equivalent to a whole note.  Four of the groups were able to finish their rhythm and performance.  Enjoy!

Our rhythm shows that four 2/8 beats equal one whole note.

Our rhythm shows how a whole note equals 2/8+2/8+2/8+2/8.

Our rhythm shows that 1/2 note +1/2 note =1 whole note.

Our rhythm shows that a whole note is equal to four quarter notes.

Our Week – December 21

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges, Weekly Newsletters

Our week has been filled with reading and writing, math and social studies.  We are completing a round of book clubs, learning more about elaboration in writing, exploring estimation and rounding, and moving into the final phases of our national holiday research project.

I hope both you and your children are feeling ready to tackle the interview and family story project. I do not mean to place stress into your vacation.  I hope this is a fun opportunity for the children to learn more about their family.  We appreciate your help and support.  We are looking forward to the stories we discover.

Our week has also been filled with cooperative group work.  We completed our “door” gecko and it is really quite beautiful – who knew a lizard could be so festive!  We’ve also begun our Grade 3 weather forecasting project to meet the SAU competency initiative.  There’s a lot going on in 3E.

Exploring Fractions

This month our calendar pattern is designed to help us discover more about fractions and equivalence. Through the pattern so far we have learned about halves, thirds, fourths, sixths and eighths.  We’ve discovered how halves, fourths, and eights AND thirds and sixths help us understand equivalence.  We’ve been reminded of what was learned last year, so we can build on that understanding.

The class has been learning a lot of about fractions in music with Mrs. Oliver too.  They’ve been creating rhythms by combining whole, half, quarter and eighth notes.  It’s not easy to do and takes a lot of concentration.  Some of the children decided to share what they’ve been learning and creating for me to video.  We will share them in the next blog post.  What will be exciting to note and notice is how this learning grows throughout the year when they play in recorder concert before Parade of the States in May.

Learning About Description in Writing

We know that the best writing creates pictures in the reader’s mind.  Authors choose their words carefully.  We’ve been trying to do this too.  We’ve realized it is not easy.  Authors take time to stop and think about word choice.

We’re learning about the parts of speech.  We’ve been learning more about how adjectives describe nouns and how adverbs describe verbs. Adverbs are tricky.  This week we challenged ourselves to include at least one adjective or adverb in each sentence.  We also tried a descriptive writing challenge.  Ten classmates kept track of each adjective or adverb they used as they were writing on Wednesday.  Sometimes the writing was better and we could visualize more of what the writer was thinking.  Sometimes the writing wasn’t better.  It was too wordy and a bit confusing.  We’ll keep practicing.  We plan to use this elaboration strategy when we turn our family stories into published books.

Bits and Pieces –

  • We finished The Wild Robot Escaped.  We are sad that Roz and Brightbill will not be part of our classroom each day, but we’re going to write to Peter Brown to see if he has any plans that could lead to a third.  We’d also like to tell him how much we enjoy his books.
  • Inspired by the NH Ladybug Book project in the library, the class decided to have monthly classroom book awards.  The children have been writing up a storm.  Each month anyone who would like to can submit a book for the contest. They’ll be read over the course of a few days and then the each child can vote for his or her top three choices. The hitch is, you cannot vote for your own book.  We held our December vote on Tuesday.
  • The Weather Forecast teams have chosen the place in the world they would like to gather data from. We’ll be forecasting from all over the world.  This week the pairs designed the Logo for their TV station.
  • We’re learning how to round numbers to the nearest 10 and the nearest 100.  We’re using what we know to make estimates.

Have a restful, happy holiday and a wonderful vacation.

Here Are This Week’s Blog Prompts

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges


Looking forward to our persuasive writing unit, we’ve begun to think about the four seasons.  We’ve begun to explore the pros and cons of each.  Eventually we’ll be selecting one season and trying to convince you that it is the absolute best season of all.

To help us prepare for this project we tried to choose something from this prompt list.  It was harder than we expected.  Read the student blogs to see which prompts were chosen and what each blogger had to say.

We’re getting better at typing, scanning and illustrating our blogs with each week of practice!

Which season do you enjoy most of all – winter, spring, summer or fall? Write that season in the blanks below and select a prompt to blog about.  Enjoy!

  • What is your favorite outdoor _________ activity and why?
  • Describe your ideal __________ day from start to finish.Add in as much detail and description as you can.
  • Describe __________ using each of your five senses.What does __________ look like? Sound like? Taste like? Feel like?  Smell like?
  • What is your favorite __________ treat? What makes it so delicious?
  • Write a poem describing the way __________ makes you feel?
  • If you could travel anywhere in the world this __________, where would
    you want to go? Why? What would you do there?

Here are this week’s blog prompts

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges

This week we’ve been reading and thinking about seasons.  We’re excited about snow and wish for more.  Here are our “snowy” blog posts …

  • What is your favorite part of winter and why?
  • Write instructions for how to make a snowman for a kid who has never, EVER seen snow before.
  • Search your mind for you best winter vacation memory and write about it.
  • Write about interviewing a polar bear or a group of penguins or an arctic fox. What did you discuss? What questions did you ask and what were the answers.
  • If I were a snowman…? Write a story about your experiences being a snowman for a day.
  • Write a poem about snow, cold, winter, snowflakes and/or ice.

Most of the class was able to complete a post this week.  They had fun writing about snow.

Blog Prompts for November 28

Mrs. Eaves Projects and Challenges

Here are the prompts the children went to the computer lab with today for our Wednesday blogging session.  Part of today’s challenge was to find an original way to illustrate the post.  We’re learning to use the hand held scanner and how to use the camera along with all the tools we can use to create a great photo.

The children chose from this list:

  • Write a short piece about a winter snowstorm – real or imagined. What do you see, hear, feel and do?
  • Describe your favorite place to explore outside. What do you see, hear, feel and do?
  • Choose a natural object as you walk out the door. How does it inspire you?
  • What are all the good things about Winter?What are all the bad things about Winter?  (You can trade winter for any of the other seasons: Spring, Summer or Fall.)

About half of them were able to write and illustrate their post in the forty-five minute blogging session.  The other half will finish in the next day or two.  Thanks for all the comments.  The class really appreciates them.  it inspires them to write more.

While we were away for Thanksgiving Break, Bamboo, our gecko shed its skin for the first time.  Here is Bamboo in its new glowing colors.