New Product: Reading Talking Sticks

This is a great guided reading or whole group reading product! Print these thought bubbles out onto cardstock and attach them to sticks. Use these Reading Talking Sticks create discussion in your whole group or guided reading group about a passage/book.

Ex.
I want to remember ____ from this because…
The setting is ______, I know this because…
The character changed when…

Local Library Book Sale

Our county library system had a book sale. All the children's books were $0.50 (paperback) or $1.00 (hardback). I was SO EXCITED to be at the sale, I even got there ten minutes early so I could be one of the first in the room. I ended up spending just $38 and look at all I got!

Beginning of a Decorated Classroom

I am trying to choose one day a week this summer to work on my classroom. I have my bulletin boards up on our large walls. Two of the walls in each classroom are bulletin/cork material so we can build bulletin boards any size we would like. It is great to have this option when decorating! Here are the fabrics I am using to go along with my fish theme:

This is the view from my desk:

This is the view from the classroom door:

New CCSS Standards for 3rd Grade Science

At the end of the school year, each of the elementary schools in our district had a representative get together to create a new grade card that aligns with the CCSS curriculum. We have had meetings for the last two years to help up learn more about math and reading CCSS. In my opinion, the Science curriculum is where most of the changes will be.

Keep: Forces & Motion, Investigations/Experiments, Impacts on the Environment

Out with: Matter, Sound, & Rocks

In with: Hazardous Weather, Animal/Plant Survival, Magnetic & Static Electricity

I have been Pinterest-ing and TpT-ing to find some resources for these new standards. I hope this help those 3rd grade teachers out there!

Hazardous Weather

Tornado in a Jar

How Does It Rain?

Make a Cloud Rain

Animal/Plant Survival

Self-Watering Seed Starters

Fossil Rock Song

YouTube: Time Lapse of Plants Following Light

TpT: Inherited Traits vs. Learned Traits

TpT: Four Types of Fossils

Magnetic Electricity

Magnetic & Non-Magnetic Sort

Magnetic Strength

Magnet Lab

Strong or Weak Magnets

Static Electricity

Static Electricity Activities

Static Electricity Discovery Tube

Static Electricity: Stationary Charges

MIA Blogger

Wow! It's been a while since I have written!! I took a couple weeks off to decompress after the school year ended.

Next school year, I am moving back into our actual school building and out of the modular unit that has been my home for the last two years. My class will be a fish/ocean theme and I am SO excited to get started decorating. I have some fishie fabric up on my classroom walls already, but need to liven it up a bit. I have pinned lots of ideas on Pinterest to liven up my fish/ocean theme. More on this later :)

On a personal note, during the first week of June, my husband and I went to California to visit my sister and her family. My niece was being baptized and we are the Godparents of Mila. I also surprised my darling husband with a day at Disneyland!

Solar System Study

My district reading curriculum is StoryTown. The 3rd grade series ends with two stories, one fiction and one nonfiction, about our solar system. It is a wonderful way to end of the school year. The students really get into learning more about space and each of the planets. Our writing for these two weeks is a research project over each planet. Students are placed in groups of two or three and assigned a planet to study.

Because it is the end of the school year and I will be moving classrooms, my bulletin boards are down. So we created a new bulletin board with the planets lined at the top and the inside of our space ship at the bottom. We filled the space with stars and comets as well.

 

Each planet group researched and organized their information into a poster to present (Speaking & Listening!) as well as an individual travel brochure. The brochures were written in a persuasive manner to entise people to visit each planet. The students got pretty creative with this, two of my favorite: Do you need a tan? Mercury is the planet for you! and Are thunderstorms your thing? Visit Neptune!

Painting Like Michelangelo

I am sure most of you have seen the Pinterest idea of having students paint under their desks like Michelangelo. As a grade level, we decided to try it out! This activity was a part of our Countdown to the Last Day balloons, which the students look forward to each day. If I only had a dime for every time I was asked "When are we popping the balloon?!"

Before we got started, each student received some drop cloth paper to protect the carpet in our classroom. I asked the students to lay down under their desks and think about summer. I asked them to imagine something fun they were going to do when school got out. This is what I wanted them to paint. Each student was given paper and tape to attach to the underside of their desks. Paint was handed out and they got started! I put some music on and we had a ball!! Their art turned out wonderfully!!