The Road to Publishing!Our 3rd Graders had the amazing opportunity to have Cheryl Phillips, a The Seattle Time Newspaper Editor come visit and give a professional perspective on the importance of editing, revising, and perseverance in our writing! She was a great resource of what her job as an editor entails and brought meaning to the hard work we've seen during Writer's Workshop! Both Ms. Klope and I saw renewed vigor and interest in the editing and revising process along with some application of professional editing tools and symbols. Thank you Cheryl! After some weeks working hard on building and crafting of each of our storywriter's voice through first person narrative writing, the time has come to embark on the road to publishing. Along the way we encountered papers in need of surgeries, first drafts turning into second and third drafts, editing and peer editing, and even some cramping hands! Come Monday, we all will have completed a polished Writing piece to become the first upload to each of their Weebly ePortfolios! Part of the fun will be including all the drafts and revisions to create a mini slide show of their hard work and progression. Student Websites!Mr. Jeffrey has worked hard to link our student's websites to mine and I am excited to use them as an effective electronic portfolio and a means for reflection by the class. My goal is to have the class blog a weekly response to a proposed question or as an extension of a class project. For now though, I would like each student to create a mini bio of who they are as a reader, writer, and artist. To help with writing such, here are some guiding questions: Reading - What books do you like to read? What are some of your favorite books? Favorite series? What are some of your reading goals? Writing - What inspires you as a writer? What are some of your favorite authors? What are some of your writing goals? Art - What inspires you as an artist? Where do you find inspiration for your art? What art tool do you like to use the most? | Sticky Note Brigade!I promise you I don't work for Post-It, but sticky notes are amazing and have taken over our Reader's Workshop! So many students have already gotten into the habit of tracking their thinking, questions and reactions to the text as they are reading. Above are some example responses as to how to effectively use sticky notes to monitor comprehension. The next step in Reading is to practice making inferences to dig deeper into what the author wants us to know but won't tell us directly. In small groups we are beginning the discussion as to what an inference is and how to infer effectively to better understand the characters and themes within the books we read. Beg, Borrow, and Carry!In Math we are taking on some pretty awesome vocabulary and applying our understanding of such words to discuss or explain our work and to check our answers. I've been stressing in Math that often the process is more important to show than just the answer. Together we came up with many ways to check our answer's reasonableness and building our problem solving skills through different strategies and ways to approach difficult problems. The current one we have discussed is the 4 step method of solving word problems: Understand, Plan, Solve, Check. Next, I hope to introduce the working backwards approach to word problems. We also have progressed from addition on to subtraction. I am working strongly towards building a foundation of understanding as to why we borrow when we subtract sometimes through manipulatives and the concrete visual that the Part/Part/Whole box provides. Tonight I hope to upload mini lessons regarding what we have covered in Math. |
Concluding With Some October Fun:
I end this update with one of the many reasons why I feel so lucky to have such an amazing and creative class. I asked for suggestions as to what I should be for Halloween and these were some of the responses!
- Mr. Liner
- Mr. Liner