Pioneer Day!!!!!

Hello!  We are only two weeks away from the much anticipated Pioneer Day, and we are SO EXCITED!  Our wonderful Pioneer Day committee has already been hard at work planning this special day, but we need a lot of volunteers to make this day successful.  Please see the note below about the help that is needed--and please consider volunteering to help with this day.  Thank you!  

Many of you have heard about the fun-filled Pioneer Day held each year in May for all of the third grade students at Carmel Elementary.  It is a day when our children experience pioneer life through various hands on activities.  A few of these fun activities include making pioneer crafts, handling antique tools, learning in a pioneer school house, preparing food, square dancing, and listening to a story teller and a fiddler.  This event will be held from 8-2:30 on Friday, May 13th.

To make this day as exciting and memorable as possible for our children, we need many volunteers.  There are many ways to help out.  We need  help both the night before with set up and the day of Pioneer Day supervising activities; we also will need some donations.  Please follow the links below to volunteer. 

If you are willing to volunteer your time on Pioneer Day or the night before with set-up, please sign up here:

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0f49a8aa28a13-pioneer

If you are willing to donate items, we will post the sign up here next week:

Link coming soon. :) 

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to call or email Mrs. Suhy: bsuhy@aol.com or call 317-506-8005.  

This day will be a great way to finish off the school year for our third graders!!  Thanks for your help and support! 

FastPass to Success

We are gearing up for our upcoming ISTEP tests.  For this first round of ISTEP, we will start testing next Monday, February 29.  We will test Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week.  Our testing is in the morning, so please make every effort to have the students here on time.  It is also important for the students to get a good night’s sleep and eat a healthy breakfast.  

We started the ISTEP practice tests today.  We will continue with the practice tests throughout the week.  To add some fun to the practice tests, we are using an amusement park theme. The students got their ISTEP FastPass today with our slogan "Don't wait in line, it's your time to shine!"  We are collecting tips on our FastPass after completing each practice test so that we will be ready to move to the front of the ISTEP line.  At the end of the week, we will celebrate that we have made it through the Islands of ISTEP amusement park with a fun celebration. 

Even though the first round of testing is still a week away, I already know that my smart and talented class is going to do wonderfully.  Their writing has improved so much this year.  They are also very skilled readers, and they are improving every day in their math problem solving.  We are excited to show the state of Indiana how smart we are!  Please help me in keeping all talk about ISTEP positive and supportive—students will do a better job of showing what they know if they are not stressed about the tests.

Fun with Figurative Language

 The third graders (and third grade teachers) were super excited to try something new in writing this past week.  We conducted writing clinics where students from our class joined students from other classes and visited all the third grade rooms to review some of the different types of figurative language.  It was a huge success!  The students loved working with some new students and showing off their writing to a new audience.  They also enjoyed getting a chance to work with new teachers.  

Students used this flip book to record definitions and examples
 of the different types of figurative language.

• One day this week each student met with Mrs. Hayes to review similes.  See if your child can tell you what a simile is and give you an example.  I bet they'll be able to do it as quick as a wink.

• One day your child visited Mrs. Nilo's class to review examples of onomatopoeia.  Ask your child to share with you the onomatopoeia example they wrote this week.  We had a lot of rings, plops, and booms appearing in our writing.

• One day during writing, each student reviewed hyperbole with Mrs. Hreno.  They learned about including exaggerations in their writing and then came up with millions of examples.

• One day each third grader visited my classroom to review personification.  I was so impressed as I watched the pencils dance across the papers as students wrote example after example of personification.  

On Friday we applied all we had learned by writing a story where the students tried to include the different types of figurative language.  What a successful week in writing!  If you want to see what your child learned, have them point out the examples of figurative language in each bullet above.  Have them use the example to explain each type of figurative language--what it is, how we use it, and why we include it in our writing.  Then see if they can start pointing out figurative language they see in their reading, on TV, and in songs.  I bet they will even catch their friends and family members using it in conversations.  The better we get at identifying it, the easier it will be to start including it naturally in our writing.  Figurative language is one way that we can take our writing to the next level.

One student's figurative language reference tool

We know our writing clinics were a success because the students did such a stellar job applying it to their writing on Friday.

Tigers in Action Wellness Club

A message from Nurse Diane . . . 

The Carmel Elementary wellness committee is looking for fun, motivated, and health conscious students to be a part of our wellness team. We are inviting all 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th grade students who are interested in health issues to help us promote healthy-living tips.  Interested students should submit a poster with a healthy tip to teach others to Nurse Diane by Tuesday, January 19, 2016.  

The committee work will include:

·        develop and promote wellness activities here at Carmel Elementary

·        write and present live announcements

·        design and create posters on healthy topics

·        help plan Family Fitness Night (which will be February 26^th)

Student wellness committee meetings will be the 4th Monday of each month after school from 2:30-3:45. Our first meeting will be Monday, January 25, 2016. Parents will need to pick up students following the meetings outside in the front of the school. Please add this information to the school dismissal manager under Tigers In Action. For more information contact Nurse Diane at dbraun@ccs.k12.in.us or 844-0168.

Submit your poster and let’s make Carmel Elementary a fun, healthy school all year!

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.

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!

Making 'Word Work' Work for Us

We are making some exciting new changes in our word work program in 3^rd 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 2^nd 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!