Understanding Characters!!

This week in Reader's Workshop, we are continuing our study of characterization.  We want to understand how characters think, feel and change during a story.  This will help us understand what we read. Below are a few examples of what we are working on during class!  

Our goal is to understand what a character looks like on the inside and the outside.  Before writing about characters in a book, we wrote about ourselves!

Reader's Workshop focus wall!

We studied many characters in our favorite stories, including Molly Lou Melon, and Camilla Cream from "A Bad Case of Stripes". We focused on what the characters looked like on the inside and the outside.  

Today, our focus was about how characters change in a story.  We read about "Lilly" from "Julius, The Baby of the World" by Kevin Henkes

The students filled out a response sheet about how their characters changed during the course of  their reading. 

How Do Spiders Eat Their Prey?

In Science, we are working on the scientific method. Our Researcher of the Week presented a science experiment to the class that demonstrated how a spider uses venom to liquefy its venom and eat its prey...yikes! :) To show this experiment, each student placed a sugar cube in a cup to signify a spider stuck in a web. Then, they put some water in the cup to act as the venom. The students watched the sugar cube dissolve and then drank the sugar water with a straw, simulating how a spider drinks its prey. During the experiment, each child filled out papers documenting each part of the scientific method. Some of the "spiders" in our class enjoyed their sugar water better than others:)

Guest Blogger, Wednesday! {Published by our Researcher of the Week}

Hi!  My name is Jackson!  I am Researcher of the week.Today we made characterization charts of ourselves.  My favorite thing in school is math.I hope you like my pictures of my friends!!

Great Website Alert!!!

We are working hard to learn homographs! This website has fun games to help students learn a variety of skills!! This would be a great site to try at home!! :)

Click Here to try!  EZSchool

Science Experiment: Is Black Really Just Black?

Today we had a fun experiment to answer the question, "Is black really just black?"   To discover the answer to this question, we drew five black dots on a paper towel. Then, we stuck a pipe cleaner through the middle black dot and placed the pipe cleaner into a cup filled halfway with water.  After waiting for a few minutes, we found the answer to our question.  The water travels up the pipe cleaner and when it touches the black marker, the black starts to spread and reveals many different colors!! 

A Map of Our Hearts

We are diving right into Writer's Workshop with our Unit on Personal Narratives. The students are taking turns telling stories and today we made "Maps of Our Hearts".  Each student created a heart shaped map marked with topics of great importance.  I will hang the maps in the classroom for the students to refer to in the future for topic ideas for the Personal Narratives we will be writing.  

We started our lesson with My Map Book, by Sara Fanelli. This creative book helped the students formulate ideas for their maps! It is a a great book for this project!

Designing our maps...

Time to paint!

What a Great First Week!!

The first week at Washington Stem Academy was so fun!! We have a great group in third grade:) Here is a little sneak peek into our classroom!