30 January 2012

Valentine Globes, Pronouns, Fractions

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm a huge fan of change. I constantly need to be moving things around at home and at school. I've always been this way. My poor Dad used to go crazy because I would move my furniture ALL the time! So we just finished lots of units and we're moving onto new things so I'm totally excited. I'm also half changing some of my room in order to prepare (hopefully) for next year. I'm going all black with bright colors, look at the way I designed my blog and you'll see how my room will be! I'm beyond excited about it! I figured I'll try a few things this year, and then if it works I'll do it next year.

In the mean time we decided we needed to make our room more festive. We still had the snowflakes hanging all over the room. I wanted to make huge Valentine's fortune cookies, but it just wasn't happening. So instead we created these:


So now our former winter wonderland, looks like this:

Now I honestly wish they were much bigger. Here's the problem. My teammate and I made these, so between the 2 of us we needed 800 circles. 200 of each color. So that's a lot of circles. The project is already difficult enough without having to worry about kiddos cutting decent circles. We have an Ellison Die Cut at school. One of our dies is a circle. My teammates TA cut out all the circles (major props to her!). I attempted to cut one globe worth on my little circle cutter, but that took long enough. So basically in order to be the most efficient we had to deal with the size we had. I still needed more patience than was available for this project. They worked though and it gives it a bit of Valentine's flair!!

We started our Pronouns unit. I would have thought pronouns would have been easy peasy for the kiddos! WRONG! They couldn't get the idea that pronouns weren't just replacing nouns with other nouns. Example:

Me: I ate a hot dog at the baseball game. What word can we say instead of hot dog?
Them: A hamburger!
Them: Pizza!
Them: Popcorn!
Me: (in my head) Oh my goodness, I wasn't thinking it was going to go like this!

We'll see how pronoun pizza's go tomorrow! I'll be sure to post pictures of our yummy pizzas once we're finished! Anyone ever have one of those days when you're thinking... oh no... one of those days? Yea that was today!

We also just started on fractions today. I'm so excited for this, because I love fractions! We drew some today using grid paper. That was another OMG moment! I have to say though, my favorite math unit is fractions. I always either do fraction sundaes or fraction gumball machines. I'm beyond excited to spice it up a bit with 3rd graders instead of firsties.

I'm also thinking of doing something Super Bowl related with fractions this Friday. We shall see. The kiddos loved this ordered pair project I gave them to do when they finished their work last week, so maybe I'll do the same kind of thing!

Has anyone done literature circles? I'm just bored with Guided Reading. I desperately need to spice it up! I think it's the fact that it's 3rd graders! Firsties are exciting, they're learning how to read. Third graders know how to read... I dunno maybe it's just a phase!

By the way, I HAVE to share about 2 assembly type things. For the past 3 years (and I think longer) my school has had a company called Historical Perspectives come to our school. They got Harriet Tubman this year. She came and pretended like she was Harriet Tubman. I loved it! We had Helen Keller last year, and someone the year before. I know they're in the Chicago area, but I don't know about anywhere else. If you're ever looking for a good historical assembly look them up, they were great.

I also am like beyond excited! When I taught first we studied Space. Well we have some colleges near by that have planetariums, but we could never get in. Or we had too many kids to go on one day, then it got expensive! We have the Adler Planetarium downtown Chicago, but that's expensive and in Chicago traffic (insert shuddering here) it would never work! So I somehow found a company with a dome that they set up at your school! They worked with me last year to set it all up within like a week. It was all such short notice. So we're doing it again this year. I planned it so 3rd and 1st get to see it. It's one of the coolest things! The best part is we don't have to worry about paying/dealing with busses! If you study Space I highly recommend it! :)

7 comments:

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Unknown said...

I love the room decor! Too fun!
(And I used to travel and do visits with a portable planetarium for a museum...it was awesome!)
Jennifer
First Grade Blue Skies

Unknown said...

Those globes are adorable!!!!!

Laura said...

I love literature circles! I did them the past few years with my higher reading groups when I taught 2nd grade, and they loved it! I haven't started them yet with my 3rd graders, but am looking forward to doing so. They are so much fun, and a good break from the usual boring reading groups :)

3rd Grade Randomness

Anonymous said...

I just moved from third (loved it...but K is fun too), and someone had recommended Book Whisperer to me. Loved the book, changed how I did my reading. Still did some small group (ie guided reading), but really tried to do more of a reading workshop. I also used resources from Beth Newingham's website. Loved how she ran her classroom.


Terri
tizatt@ecsdnv.net

Laura Riggs said...

Hi!!
I recently found your Blog and I love it!! Thank you for all the awesome resources that you offer for free. I have also visited your shop and I intend on buying many resource from that as well.
I am just beginning my teaching career, so I am confused about the Job Spot resource. Can you please give me a brief description of the jobs? I would love to be able to use this resource, however, I am not sure what some of the jobs responsibilities are.

Thanks so much for your help,

Laura

Anonymous said...

Hey I do literature circles with my high group in third grade. They love being independent! I have assigned jobs for each member of the group. (Discussion director, connector, summarizer, vocab enricher, predictor etc.) They keep the same job for 2 weeks then rotate. I assign them how many pages I want them to read then they meet twice a week. They have to hand in all the worksheets to me, and I have them do a project at the end of the book that culminates everything. I hope your kiddos enjoy the lit circle!