Friday, November 20, 2015
Creative Cartographers
I loved seeing all the creative maps come in from our Map in a Month project. It was so much fun listening to all of the fun presentations as the students played 'travel guide' and told us all about their country and which places we should visit. The students even made travel brochures for their new land--a chance for us to practice both descriptive and persuasive writing. I am so lucky to have such a creative bunch of students to work with this year. Take a look below at the amazing maps from my favorite cartographers--just click on the picture if you'd like to see it larger.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Book Drive
The 4th grade Leadership Forum is sponsoring a book drive to benefit School on Wheels, an organization in the Indianapolis area that supports students experiencing homelessness. Indy School on Wheels provides tutors, school supplies, uniforms, and family support to children who don't have a place to call home. Our original goal was for each student to donate one book which would give Carmel Elementary 500 books to donate to this worthy cause, but we already surpassed that goal on day 1--we brought in over 600 books! Wow! Now we are excited to see just how many books our school can collect.
Check out this link to see a video our Leadership Forum made: https://voice.adobe.com/a/4mgQ3
Please consider looking through your books this week to see if you can find one to donate. CE and School on Wheels will appreciate your gift!
Check out this link to see a video our Leadership Forum made: https://voice.adobe.com/a/4mgQ3
Please consider looking through your books this week to see if you can find one to donate. CE and School on Wheels will appreciate your gift!
Monday, November 9, 2015
Making 'Word Work' Work for Us
We are making some exciting new changes in our word work program in 3rd grade. We had
noticed that while the students are really good at memorizing the 20 words on
our spelling lists for a weekly test, they struggled with applying these rules and patterns to
other words, and they are not spelling these words correctly in their
writing. In order to be responsive to
these struggles, we are changing our word study work so that it focuses on
applying rules to as many words as possible and also focuses on spelling words correctly
in our daily writing. We have tried out
these changes for two weeks, and we are so happy with what we are seeing in the
students’ spelling and writing.
Here are some key points to our new word work routine:
·
A few days a week we will be using sound cards with
the students—you may remember these from 2nd grade. We will be adding to the deck of cards all
year so that the students will be continually reviewing rules and patterns from
this year and previous years so that we can retain these skills.
·
The first two days of the week will focus on
learning new patterns and applying them to many words at varying levels of
difficulty. For example, when we learned
the ‘oi’ pattern during the first week, some students brainstormed words like
coin and boil while others got to disappointment and moisture--students are so
excited when they apply these patterns to more challenging words.
·
On our third day we will do dictated sentences
where we can apply this week’s patterns along with reviewing previous weeks’ patterns. This will also give us time for some grammar
review.
·
Thursday and Friday are spent writing stories
where we focus on applying all of the spelling (and grammar) rules to our
writing—first with a partner and then independently.
Students will no longer be bringing home a list of 20 words to
memorize for a Friday test. They will
get a new rule, pattern, and/or word part that will be the focus for the week’s
word study work. There will be an at-home
activity that will take the place of the old spelling contract that will need
to be completed at some point during the week.
The formal assessment for the report card will be done in the same way
as it has always been assessed since the standard is for spelling correctly in
daily writing; however, students will be a little better prepared for this since our focus is being switched to spelling in our writing. Informal assessments will be taken by
teachers viewing the word lists, dictated sentences, and writing—not for
grades, but so that we can see what we are doing well and what we need to work
on more. We see so much potential for
this change to improve students’ spelling where it counts—in their daily
writing. We are very excited about how
the rest of this year will go!
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