Mrs. Hepburn's Class Newsletter
November 25, 2013
News
The newsletter this week is going to be brief. I would like to explain what the students have been working on over the past couple of weeks. All of the students are creating a book trailer. This process is extremely time consuming and has taken a ton of planning. The kids needed to think about the theme of their book to locate proper theme music, choose pictures that do not distract from the message of the book and create a script that will be recorded in Garage Band and uploaded to their I-Movie Book Trailer. The planning has at times been frustrating for them, because they felt like they could just create a movie about the book. Thankfully, now they are seeing the fruits of their labor and that there is a reason behind the pre-planning they have worked on for the past couple of weeks. Our hope is to have them completed Tuesday and uploaded to the class website by the end of next weekend. I will send out an email when they are uploaded to the site.
The second graders are also creating a website that explains the tales of their Flat Me’s. The website is interactive, the home page has a world map with links that are attached to each student’s individual web page. This will take another week or so to complete, but they are well on their way towards finishing this project. The second graders are finishing their research on continents and a writing piece about each continent. They will move into researching various Native American tribes when we return and will create a non-fiction text about a tribe they choose to research. For this project we will need brown paper bags, about 30 total, so please send them in and begin collecting them over the next couple of weeks.
The third grade students have been working on ecosystem research. They completed a multi-paragraph essay and 3-D model about their ecosystem. Last week they wrote an opinion piece about which natural disaster would be most destructive to their ecosystem. They are moving into an author study on Lynn Cherry. In this author study they will observe the writing of Lynn Cherry then write a narrative piece using her style of writing. This will take them until the end of the quarter.
Finally, I hope you heard about Friday’s interactive story called Who Muddied the Mississippi. The students had the opportunity to have a role in a story about polluting the Mississippi. They were able to see that the choices we make in daily life affect the world around us and we briefly discussed ways we could improve our choices. A huge thank you to Mrs. Falcomata who put all of the canisters together for the entire third grade to make the event happen, it was truly appreciated!
Wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving and a nice, long weekend. A reminder we do not have school on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Carrie Hepburn