3G News
Week of February 4-7, 2014
Announcements
Snow Day Makeups:
April 14th (Day 1)
April 15 (Day 3)
April 21st (Day 5)
Thank you to those of you who were able to attend our "Eating and Reading Cafe". The children had a blast transforming our room and wanted it to last all day!
A Glance at our Week
This week we had our all-school hallway read in celebration of Read Across America. It was a very peaceful, and as you can see, cozy experience!
This week, we began our opinion/persuasive writing unit. To drum up excitement, we had an intense Writer's Workshop where we planned, wrote speeches, and presented them in one session! Our thesis statement: We should have extra recess during the week of NJASK.
Step 1: Our "Thinktank". The children felt very strongly about this issue and we had an exciting, passionate brainstorming session as we first thougt about our audience (Mrs. Schultz) and then the strongest ways to persuade her of our idea.
Step 2: Writing: "fast and furious". The author of our writing program, Lucy Caulkins sometimes encourages children to write "fast and furious" in order to get their ideas down on paper. The children had 20 minutes to draft a speech centered on our thesis statement.
Step 3: Presenting. Children thrive on instant results and Mrs Shultz was curious and kind enough to come and listen to pieces of the children's freshly written speeches. The final decision is TBD until early next week!
We have had fun all week tracking our mushers in the Iditarod! Each day, the children used ipads or laptops to log onto the website and fill in their musher stats for that day which included their position in the race, how many dogs they have, how long they spend in each checkpoint, how far they've traveled so far, and how far they have left to go. They also plot their point on a map, and consider the distance between checkpoints to predict where they will be the following day. If all goes according to plan (the race that is), we will have some final results next week!