Spelling Words for "Officer Buckle and Gloria"

Lesson 1:
1. sat
2. felt
3. last
4. send
5. next
6. best
7. went
8. hand
9. stand
10. past
11. grand
12. stamp
13. belt
14. lend
15. checked

First Week of School

What a great first week of school we've had! I'll start posting pictures as soon as I have all of the blog permission slips turned in.

The week started off with 100% attendance (either in person or by telephone) at our Back To School Conferences. Thank you, parents and grandparents, for taking the time to come in with your child and talk about third grade. I really believe your students do better when they know they have family support behind them.

The first few days of school are filled with lots of listening, some sharing, some "getting-to-know-you" activities, and, hopefully, some fun, too! There's also a lot of filling out forms for parents. We've gotten most of the forms back. If you still have some at home, please send them back to school with your child.

Next week, we will begin our first reading story and our first science chapter. Check back here on Monday or Tuesday for the first spelling list, too. We're ready to learn!

Just around the corner ...

August 15th! Yikes, where did summer go?

I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom with a wonderful new group of students. Soon, we will be learning, creating, and getting to know each other.

I'll see you all on the first day of school!  :)

Spelling Words and misc.

This is my last post of the school year. I have really enjoyed working with your children this year. They are a wonderful bunch of kids! I know they will continue to work hard with Mrs. Richter during second semester.

Did you know that 12, 171 minutes have been read and recorded on reading logs (Sept.-Dec.) since the beginning of the school year? Let's see if that total can be beat during the second half of the year! :)

The pictures below show the artwork created by the students after studying the artist Wassily Kandinsky.

Last week we had a guest speaker, Nancy Raymond, come in to tell us about the Pennies for Peace program. She will come for several weeks to talk with the students about helping others and teach them about famous people who have helped others in the past. Our penny jar level has been increasing every day.

Spelling Words for "Ramona Forever"

1. started

2. card

3. park

4. smart

5. star

6. shark

7. mark

8. barber

9. party

10. pardon

11. bark

12. tart

13. carpet

14. farther

15. barn

Yoga Poses - third grade style

I just realized I hadn't posted these photos yet. During the beginning of the year, we were fortunate to have Liz come into our classroom several times to teach us some of the fundamentals of yoga. The students did a great job and wanted me to take pictures of them demonstrating the poses. There are some duplicates in poses below because I had such willing models. Above the first of each pose, I have written the Sanskrit name of the pose and also the English name of the pose.

Adho Mukha Svanasana - downward dog

Urdhua Mukha Svanasana - upward dog

Sun Salutation (end)

Tadasana - mountain pose

Meditation

Bakasana - crow pose (This is an extremely difficult balance pose.)

Vrksasana - tree pose

Virabhadrasana 1 - Warrior 1

Virabhadrasana 2 - Warrior 2

Virabhadrasana 3 - Warrior 3

Savasana - corpse pose (You can see why this is a final relaxation pose.)

Happy New Year!

The students came back from vacation rested and full of stories of the fun things that kept them busy over break. They have been working very hard this week!

Spelling words for "The Talent Show"
1. song
2. law
3. because
4. soft
5. dawn
6. crawl
7. lost
8. taught
9. long
10. pause
11. frost
12. lawn
13. hawk
14. laundry
15. author

Experimenting with Sound / Spelling Words

We had three guest speakers this afternoon during science. Scott, Patrick, and Wesley are engineering students at ICC. They talked to the kids about what engineers do and how they work together to solve problems and create new things.

Our science topic this week is sound. We've been learning about how sound is made and how it moves. We've also talked about pitch and volume. Our guests started out the afternoon with a fun game of "Telephone" as a way to show how sound moves (in this case, from person to person).

The students then created a tambourine made out of paper plates and bells.

The final activity was making plastic cup telephones. There was a variety of strings to choose from. The students got to test out which strings worked better. It was fun to see the students' eyes light up the first time they heard their partner's voice over their phone line. I can only imagine that Alexander Graham Bell felt the same excitement. The students also experimented with criss-crossing two or three sets of phones to see if they could still hear each other.

Spelling Words - Journey, week 1

1. journey

2. meadow

3. camera

4. travel

5. lilacs

6. album

7. photograph

8. garden

9. glasses

10. mother

11. grandmother

12. father

13. grandfather

14. sister

15. brother