Literature Circles

The grade 3 students will shortly begin a new reading activity called Literature Circles. In literature circles, small groups of students gather together to discuss a piece of literature in depth. The discussion is guided by students' response to what they have read. You may hear talk about events and characters in the book, the author's craft, or personal experiences related to the story. Literature circles provide a way for students to engage in critical thinking and reflection as they read, discuss, and respond to books. Collaboration is at the heart of this approach. Students reshape and add onto their understanding as they construct meaning with other readers. Finally, literature circles guide students to deeper understanding of what they read through structured discussion and extended written and artistic response.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand what literature circles are is to examine what they are not:

Literature Circles are . . .	Literature Circles are not . . .
Reader response centered	Teacher and text centered
Part of a balanced literacy program	The entire reading curriculum
Groups formed by book choice	Teacher-assigned groups formed solely by ability
Structured for student independence, responsibility, and ownership	Unstructured, uncontrolled "talk time" without accountability
Guided primarily by student insights and questions	Guided primarily by teacher- or curriculum-based questions
Intended as a context in which to apply reading and writing skills	Intended as a place to do skills work
Flexible and fluid; never look the same twice	Tied to a prescriptive "recipe"

Students have already chosen the book that they would like to read for our first Literature Circle and are grouped accordingly. There will be four students reading the same book and they will meet weekly to discuss the assigned reading (typically a few chapters ) for that week. They will each have a different role to prepare for before the meeting and will have a turn doing each job before the book is done. The roles are Ironman- the Illustrator; Supergirl- the Questioner; Captain America- the Connector; Spiderman-the Summarizer; and Wonder Woman- the Word Wizard. We have practiced these roles over the past week, and I am sure your child can explain them in more detail to you. It is my intention that all reading and preparation work will be done in class, however if a student is absent I may send either the reading and/or preparation work home for them to complete so that they will be ready for their next Literature Circle meeting. 
I would also like to thank everyone for your support organizing pictures and costumes for our Wax Museum Biography event! I was so proud of all of the grade 3 students enthusiasm for this project. The grade 2s who provided us with an audience learned a lot about the subjects, and are all eager for their turn to be part of a Wax Museum next year! 

Wax Museum Date

The Wax Museum presentations will be next Tuesday, March 29th. Please have students bring in any props/costumes that they will require on this date. I will also send home a paper reminder in their agendas tomorrow. Thank you for all of your support from home to help make this project a success!

Biography Wax Museum

This information is being sent home in paper format today, but since I always worry not everything finds its way home, I am posting it here as well:

Biographical Wax Museum

The grade 3 students have been busy researching a famous person for their biographical research project. While most of the topic choices are significant Canadians, there are a few exceptions to this rule.

I would love to have the class participate in a fun culminating event to share the information that they have learned by holding a “Wax Museum” of the famous people they are researching. This would involve a bit of work at home that I am hoping you would be willing to help out with.

The premise of the Wax Museum presentation is that students will be in character as statues. Other students will circulate the room turning “on” the statues to hear a short (4-5 sentence) speech that describes their legacy and important contributions from the perspective of their biographical subject. These short speeches will be prepared in class.

The at-home portion would be to help your child find few photos to print off of the internet of their subject. These will be used for a back drop poster for their presentation and can be sent in as soon as possible. This back drop will be made in class- the only home requirement is for a few images to be sent in. If you do not have access to a computer or printer, please let me know.

I would also like each child to come to school the day of the wax museum with props or costumes to help get them into character. The costume need not be elaborate and some examples could include a paint smock and brush for an artist; a sports shirt and helmet for a hockey player; or a stack of books, pen and notepad for an author.  I have not yet set a date for the Wax Museum since students are still busily working on their research, but you can begin by brainstorming and organizing a few ideas! I will be in contact again shortly to finalize the dates. If you have any questions, please email me at amber.steeves@ocdsb.ca

                                                                                                Warmest Regards,

                                                                                                Amber Steeves

Biographies

The unit we are currently working on is an integration of non-fiction texts and biographies, with a little bit of Black History Month thrown into the mix! Students started out by writing (Auto)Bio Poems about themselves. As we work to finish these up, students are listening to a number of biographical books about key historical figures in Black History such as Ruby Bridges, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Our next step will move to making Bio Books in small groups. Bio Books are simply lap books that highlight important details on the subject's key contributions, family life, events and obstacles they overcame. The first one we make will be on Ruby Bridges. She was the first black student in an all white elementary school in New Orleans. As we progress further into biographies, students will choose a Canadian figure to study and subsequently produce a Bio Book or Bio Poem about.

Prefixes and Suffixes

This week we have been talking about prefixes and suffixes and how they can help us to determine the meaning of a word. For example, knowing that the prefix 're' means 'again' helps us to understand the word 'replay', and knowing that the prefix 'mis' means 'wrong or incorrectly' helps us understand 'misinformed'. Many of our activities this week centered around this topic. We have anchor charts such as the ones below posted in the classroom to help us remember what we have learned.
      

I have also introduced a weekly message activity to help build upon the grade 3 students' editing skills. In this message I will be purposefully making spelling, grammatical and organizational errors for the class as a group to find and correct. They will find these the first day we look at the message. The second day we visit the message, we will identify certain words as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Lastly, the third time we look at it, we will think of ways to improve upon it by using more interesting words, adding descriptive words or more detail. We may also use it to help apply spelling strategies or to practice forming contractions. By working on these skills purposefully as a class, my hope is that it will become second nature when students independently edit their own work.

Jargon Journals and Newspapers

My apologies for not posting sooner since starting up after the holidays. Although the blog wasn't updated, we certainly have been busy in the classroom!

We have started a new weekly activity called "Jargon Journals". Each week I will pull four vocabulary words from read aloud books and we will practice strategies to determine the words' definitions (context in the story, prefix/suffixes, personal experiences with the words, etc). Students will also be required to use the words in writing activities and determine their part of speech (adverb, adjective, noun, etc). I hope that this will be a fun and engaging way to review some vocabulary and grammar. If last week's activity based on the book "Snowmen at Night" was any indication, I am sure it will be!

We have also been examining elements and characteristics of newspaper articles. We have talked about details such as headlines, bylines, captions, datelines, and font styles that are used in newspapers. We have read articles and summarized the content, and now this week will be writing our own articles about personal experiences.

Happy Holidays!

Over the past two weeks we have continued to explore figurative language. The kids are becoming pros at recognizing examples of them in everyday speech and in books. I had hoped to use song lyrics of popular songs to further hone in on their skills, however with the busy-ness of the last week of school before holidays, those plans will be on hold until after the holiday break. I also plan to give the students more opportunity to use figurative language in their own creative writing early in the new year. One of our first activities back will be to do some sensory writing using figurative language about popcorn. If anyone has any concerns with their child eating air popped popcorn, please contact me so that I can accommodate accordingly. Thank you and have a wonderful holiday with family and friends. Happy New Year 2016!

Figurative Language

We opened up our unit on figurative language this week. I generally introduced the concepts of alliteration, hyperboles, similes, metaphors, idioms and onomatopoeia and personification. If you need a refresher, you may be interested in watching this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMSLgxj2dxk
Each day we will learn about each type of figure of speech in more detail, and I will be giving the students opportunities to find examples in books and write their own creative ones. This week we had time to work on similes and metaphors. We will continue with the others next week.

Inferring Wrap Up

This week we continued to use both picture and text clues to infer deeper meanings of books we read. The students were fascinated by pictures from the collection "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick". The author Chris Van Allsburg came across the pictures of Harris Burdick through a friend, Peter Wenders. Apparently, Burdick presented the pictures with their titles and captions to Wenders in hopes that Wenders would be interested in purchasing the stories that accompanied the illustrations. Wenders was intrigued by the pictures and asked Burdick to submit the corresponding stories the next day. However, Wenders never heard from Harris Burdick again, so the "true" stories behind the pictures were never revealed. Not only are the circumstances surrounding the pictures quite mysterious, but so are the pictures. Students chose one of the pictures and then made inferences by completing an O-W-I chart (observations, "wonder" questions, and inferences based on the observations and questions).  I hope to finish our last inferencing activity early next week and then move on to a unit on figurative language. 

Beginning inferences

As posted last week, we have begun our work on making inferences while reading. We opened the unit by practicing the language of making inferences. Since when making inferences you are really making informed guesses on the author's message, we use language such as "I think...", "Maybe...", and "Possibly..." while then supporting our inferences with evidence and personal examples.

We then read the book "Yo! Yes!". This book has a very limited number of words, but is still able to convey a story. We examined techniques that the author, Chris Raschka, used to help us infer this story. Using these techniques, students are now busy creating their own "scripts" of limited dialogue. They will present these on Monday to the class. Students are invited to bring in any props or costumes that they would like to use in their skits. I expect that Monday's class will be a lot of fun!

October-Present Overview

Due to labour negotiations, it has been a long time since I have last posted. I will provide a short overview of what we have been up to in grade 3 English, and then I hope to return to a more weekly updating schedule. 

As you may remember, we had read the books "The Name Jar" and "My Name is Yoon" when learning about making connections. I also sent home a homework sheet for students to learn more about where their names came from and why they were chosen. We took this information and used it to write persuasive paragraphs about why their name was special. We talked about strong topic sentences that appeal to readers, using supportive details and how to write concluding sentences.

While learning about media devices, we examined a number of movie posters to discuss features that helped persuade target audiences to go see the movie they were promoting. We created our own movie posters for Robert Munsch books. We also wrote letters to Robert Munsch when we were learning about the components of a friendly letter.

We have also been working on parts of speech- especially the difference between adverbs and adjectives which I found to be a tricky differentiation for many students to make. Adverbs are words that describe verbs (quickly, loudly, fast) and describe to what extent (i.e. very, really, too), and often end in the suffix -ly. Adjectives are words that describe things and often and with the suffixes such as: -ful, -ous, -able, -ive,  and -ible. Students created monsters and then wrote corresponding sentences using both adjectives and adverbs to describe them.

I have made some changes to our word study program. I had been providing students with four words from our high frequency word wall with a common spelling pattern and then letting them choose 1 choice word that they wanted to learn how to spell. In order to allow students even more choice to accommodate the varied spelling abilities in the class, while also providing more focus on the spelling pattern itself, I have decided to run a "chunk spelling" program. Each Friday, students will be given a word chunk (group of letters- last week it was "et"). Independently and then as a group, we brainstorm as many words as we can that contain the chunk. They are sorted into short words (get, let, bet), medium words (forget, regret, pretzel) and long words which often require the application of suffixes and prefixes (unforgettable, regretful). After a huge master list is made, students choose ten of these words. Each morning for a few minutes before my lessons begin, students have an opportunity to do activities to help them practise the words that they have chosen so they are not required to anything with them for homework. On Fridays, there will be a chance for students to quiz each other on their spelling words to see how they are doing, but I will not be recording their scores as I get enough information on their spelling abilities from their natural written work. I continue to post the grade appropriate word wall list in the classroom and encourage children who require its support to use it and to review these words at home. The word wall list is posted on my blog under the "spelling words and activities" page. 

Currently we are working on using quotation marks correctly to write dialogue. We are making a class joke book to accomplish this. It has been a lot of fun but as this is a new skill, it is one that we will continue to work on. We will also be beginning a unit on the reading comprehension strategy of inferring shortly.  An inference is when we understand things that the author does not tell us. We infer why things happen, why characters behave the way they do, and how characters are feeling. The reader creates inferences based on clues that the author does provide and their own knowledge, or schema.  

Sparkles, Superstars and Spelling

I hope everyone had a great weekend. Here's an update of what we got up to in grade 3 English, and what's on the roster coming up! 

We ended our week practising to stretch a sentence to add more detail and to include what I call "sparkle" words- these are words that more enticing to a reader. Think 'stupendous' rather than 'great', or 'exclaimed' rather than 'said'. Students also began a Word Superstar weekly vocabulary activity. Each day students will be given a clue to help them guess the Superstar Word. Clues might be how the word is used in a sentence, a synonym or antonym, the part of speech, the definition, etc. The word will be revealed on each Friday, and the goal is to help expand their vocabulary in an exciting way. 

My classes have also started using a class word wall. This is a list of words that children will have access to every time there is a writing activity. It includes many high frequency words that they should be able to spell by the end of the year. Each week, children will do a variety of activities to practise four of these words, as well as an additional word chosen by them from their class writing or personal interests. You can find a copy of the word wall words in the "spelling" tab of the blog home page. While there will not be a formal weekly spelling test, children will bring their weekly word lists home each Friday and are encouraged to continue to practise if they have not mastered them yet. That being said, I believe one of the best ways to become a great speller is to be exposed to words so please encourage many opportunities for reading and writing in English over rote memorisation of a few words.

Dependent on students' personal spelling needs, I will be introducing a program called Words Their Way with this grade 3 class. Working with small groups with similar spelling abilities, we will work on sorting and spelling words based on word patterns or features. More on this program to come as we continue with it. 

The first reading comprehension strategy that we will work on this year is Making Connections. There are three main kinds of connections that readers can make: text to self where readers find similarities between what happens in the story and their own life; text to text where they find similarities between two different books; and text to world where similarities are found between the book and the world (or community). I invite you to encourage your children to make connections in the books that they read at home too, referencing specific examples in the books to support their answers. If I taught your child last year, you may remember that I introduced the idea of making connections to them then. I'm excited to see how much deeper their connections will be now! 

Sorry for any confusion

My apologies if you had a grade 2 post sent to your email account. I posted on the wrong blog page and didn't realize until it was too late. While that grade 2 post has since been deleted from my grade 3 blog, it was likely sent to your inbox and I have no way of retrieving it. 

First Week Activities

I had a great first week of teaching my new grade 3 class! They are lovely group of children, and I am excited for what the year will bring. The first week was spent doing activities based on Melanie Watt's new book "You're Finally Here" and reviewing parts of speech (adverbs, adjectives, nouns and verbs- ask your child about the hilarious game of Hot Potato this entailed!). Today we moved on to learning about subjects and predicates in a sentence, and will soon begin discussing how to stretch a sentence with detail to make it really sparkle. 

One activity that I do with all of my classes as a positive reinforcement/behavioural management tool is a bead system. Each student in the class has a pipe cleaner hanging on the wall. When they are caught listening well, working diligently or helping a friend they are given a bead on their pipe cleaner. At the end of the month the pipecleaners are taken down and are made into bracelets. They will be allowed to bring their bracelets home to keep and you will be able to see just how many beads they earned with me each month! I will also occasionally pass out "Caught You Doing Something Nice" tickets which are simply just small coupons that are given to students who are caught being an extra helpful friend.

Welcome to the Grade 3 English Blog!

Thank you for checking out the blog for your child's grade 3 English class! I am happy that the information that I sent home today has found its way to you. I will write more detailed posts as the week progresses to tell you more about myself and the program. For now, welcome to a new school year and to my blog!