Grandparent’s Lunch

Thank you to all who came to Grandparent’s Lunch at Bartlett!  It was so nice to meet so many of you!  We hope you had a wonderful time.  The kids had a great time visiting with you!

Reminder

Bartlett Dives Into Reading!

Congratulations to all of you that have turned in Bartlett Dives Into Reading logs!!!  We still have 5 children to go to get 100%.  There is still time…  So get out your books!

The Earth Hour event is this Saturday!  Don’t forget to turn off your lights!  In preparation we will be practicing with “lights out at Bartlett” on Friday afternoon.  We will also be doing several activities during the week in preparation for Earth Hour and Earth Day!  We hope that you will join us!

Each day, we will have another question from the two chapters of Winn-Dixie.  Write us a comment if you know the answer!

We get a chance to read with our first grade book buddies in Miss Frisbie’s room each week!

The Great Mail Race!

We are starting a project where we collect information and pictures from across the country, and around the world.  We have developed a letter, and questionaire for classrooms to complete.  It is exciting to send out our first letters, and collect our first responses!  The data will be collected on our new wiki, called The Great Mail Race.  If you would like to share some information about your school and where you live, please check out our wiki.  We would love to hear from you!!!

State Projects

This week, we started new state projects!  Each of the children will be conducting research on one state.  We began the process this week, by generating questions that we would need to ask, before beginning our research.  Once we entered our questions into Kidspiration, we organized them by topic, in our state web.  Take a look at a great example of one of our webs!

President for a Day!

Today, the kids applied to be President for the Day!  In filling out their applications, they learned many of the duties of the President, and had to make some difficult decisions.  They also learned many interesting facts about previous presidents!  Ask them to show you the results of their applications!

Our Crayon Box

Gingerbread Houses

Our winter wordle

Today, we created a class wordle!  We had brainstormed lists of winter words, then each of us chose the word that they thought best represented winter.  This is our class winter wordle!  Then, we each created our own winter wordles on a mitten.  We will put pictures of these when we finish them!

This collection of words was created at www.wordle.net.  On this page, you can enter a collection of words, and they will arrange them in a variety of ways, fonts and colors.  It is great fun!  This wordle is a collection of words from our class blog!  The header of our blog was also created in wordle.

We made some great weather flip books to help show what we know.

Water Cycle

We have been learning about the water cycle, and made some great diagrams of it.  Each illustration lifts, and behind each door you will find a description of each part of the water cycle.

Live from Bartlett School…

Reporting live from Bartlett School, we have weather reporters reporting on today’s delicious weather menus… 

The kids worked very hard on this integrated unit.  We combined literacy, by reading “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”, and discussing the important elements of the story.  We have been learning about weather in science, and discussed the importance of meteorology, and what a weather forecast would include.  We decided to create our own weather forecasts, with some scrumptious menus.  To start our writing, we created webs in Kidspiration to help us organize our thoughts.  We used these webs to help us put our information together.  Once we had chosen, and written our menus, we illustrated our stories in Kidpix.  While in Kidpix, we practiced exporting our illustration as an image.  We recorded our weather forecasts in class using imovie.  Once we had all of these pieces, we put them all together in imovie, creating our own movies, with transitions, and sound!  We hope you enjoy these riveting reports!

Clouds…

Clouds, clouds, clouds…  Before the Thanksgiving break, we read about, and observed clouds.  Then, we decided to make some of our own.  We put white paint on blue paper, and used straws to blow our clouds into shapes.  We read the book, “It Looked Like Spilt Milk” and then wrote our own pages for the book.  What do you see in our clouds?

Parent/teacher conferences are this week!  I look forward to discussing all of the great things that we are doing in the classroom.  Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns regarding conference times.

Thanksgiving Lunch

Thank you for such a delicious meal!

Math… you may have noticed a blue form for Everyday Math that was sent home.  There was also a bright yellow card with the form.  This information explains you you and your child can access Everyday Math online.  This is a fantastic resource!  You can access an interactive student reference book, as well as play online games.   This would be a great resource to help the children practice and review measurement, perimeter and area, that we are currently working on.  We hope to see you all this Thursday at Math Nigh, where we will walk you through this great resource, and you can learn some new games with your children.

This week we continued to focus on ideas in writing.  We took all of those great ideas we had collected for Halloween, and narrowed our focus.  Once we chose a great idea, or topic, we brainstormed, and filled in a story web to plan our writing.  The kids did a great job with this, and have some great stories going!

OH, WHAT FUN!!!  We spent the morning doing some pumpkin exploration!!!  Which pumpkin has more seeds – a small pumpkin, or a large one?  We dug into some different sized pumpkins to find out.

Today, we focused on Free Writing for Ideas.  In this exercise, I asked the children to close their eyes and envision the beach.  After exploring the senses, we generated a list of things that came to their minds.  The list was extensive, and could have gone on, and on…  The children then practiced this strategy with the topic of Halloween.  We discussed how beneficial creating a list of ideas to help expand a topic would be.  What a creative group of writers we have!

Math update…
We are moving right along with Unit 3. This unit focuses on measurement. We have been learning to distinguish between how we measure, the tools we measure with, and the units of measurement. For example, we measure our math book, with a ruler, in inches, or centimeters. We have been practicing measuring to the nearest inch, 1/2 inch, 1/4 inch in the U.S. Customary System. We have also been measuring to the nearest centimeter and millimeter in the Metric System. We will begin to explore perimeter and area in the lessons to come. Remember to check out the new Everyday Math Online to access the Student Reference Book, as well as practice skills with Math games. You can access this site at www.everydaymathonline.com, and by following the directions that were sent home this week.

We made some great landform maps on Friday! What a great activity to wrap-up Unit 1 with!

Check out our first Voice Thread!

The kids completed the reading sessions of NECAP testing today.  They worked very hard, and should be proud of the effort that they put into the tests.  We will commence the math portion of the NECAP next week.  Please remember to get some good sleep next week!

We have spent quite a bit of time working  on communities.  We have shared, and discussed various aspects of communities.  Check out these great foldables that we made on suburb, rural and urban communities!

Sitton Spelling words for the week: along, while, might, next, sound

"ME" collages

A big thank you to all of you that came to Open House!  It was so nice to see many of you again, and meet many of you for the first time.  I hope you enjoyed seeing your children’s work, and where they spend their day.  If you have any further questions, or want to see any additional work please feel free to contact me at any time.  I look forward to a great year with all of you!

Last week was full of some great learning.  We reviewed the writing process, and what good writers include in their writing.  Then, we worked on completing our September writing prompts.  I look forward to reading their writing – they have been working very hard!

We had a great week of school!  We dove right in to some great learning, and are off to a great start.  The Everyday Math program is off and running!  The week was full of reviewing concepts, and will continue reviewing next week.  We took some spelling assessments, both for the Sitton Program, and a phonetic inventory of words to see what words, and skills we need to work on throughout the year.  The kids have started to choose some really good books to read, and we will continue to work on choosing “just-right” books.  We cracked open our brand new Social Studies books, and have begun a unit on Community!  The kids worked on vocabulary cards to go along with the beginning of this unit.  Hope you all had a great weekend!

Welcome Back!

We had a great first week of school!  It is hard to believe that we are into September.  We have gotten to know each other this week, and have started to develop a routine.  We spent the morning in the computer lab creating our “Hopes and Dreams” documents.  Check back to see our hopes and dreams for third grade.

Reflection, rotation and translation, are all concepts that we have covered this week.  We also explored frieze patterns and symmetry as well.   Unit ten was wrapped up by adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers.  We practiced this concept by filling out a math ledger, and adding and subtracting credits and debits.  This was not a new concept, because we have had a lot of practice with this with our classroom economy.  We will start unit 11 next week!

Plants!

The kids went through a circuit today on the playground.  They had to try to make it around the entire playground without touching the ground.  They also had to work as a team.  Great work everyone!

We had a great week!  The kids finished up their NH scrap maps, and they look great!  We also completed our NWEA testing in math, reading and language usage.  I am so proud of the entire class.  They ALL worked so hard, and did a great job!   Next week we have NECAP assessments in Science.  I am sure that they will go extremely well.  We will be commencing Unit 9 in math next week, on fractions, decimals and percents.  In this unit, students will build upon previously learned material on fractions and decimals, and delve into some new concepts.  In literacy, we will be completing our Dear America book.  This book made some great connections to the social studies content that we were studying.  We will also continue to work on prefixes and suffixes, as this appears to be a tricky area for most.  We have had some great practice with persuasive essay writing, and will be writing some final drafts next week as well.  Our NH unit should be drawing to a close, and we are excited to get started on a Living Things unit in science.  In this unit, we will be focusing on plants, but will draw connections to all living things.  I hope you all have a great weekend, and maybe I will see some of you on Saturday as we finish up the playground!

NH County Scrap Maps

Well, with all the excitement of the playground build, we needed a fun project to end our Friday. The kids collected scraps, and objects from home to create some incredible maps of NH’s ten counties.  Check out some of their great work!

PLAYGROUND BUILD!

Yeah!!! It is finally here!  The kids were able to watch Bartlett history in the making on Friday. They are counting down the days until they can finally play on this INCREDIBLE playground. Thank you to all the parents and volunteers that contributed time and effort to this playground.  I was lucky enough to spend the entire weekend working on it!  It was amazing to see the Bartlett spirit!

I hope that you all had a WONDERFUL spring break!  Hopefully you were able to soak up some of that wonderful sunshine!

State House

Wow!  What a great day!  We could not have asked for a better experience!  We had wonderful weather, and great hosts!  We were greeted by Representative Rip Holden, and our tour guide Virginia.  They both did a fantastic job showing us the State House, and answering our questions. Representative Holden was very kind, and he spent the day with us. We were also very lucky because Governor Lynch took time out of his busy schedule to talk with us. Then, later that day, he came out to see us once again, when we were eating lunch on the State House lawn.  Thank you to Lowell, and Mr. Giroux for joining us on this trip!  We had a great time!

Lowell Mills

We visited the Lowell Mills on April 3rd.  What a beautiful day, and what a great trip!  We were able to see many of the things that we had been studying.  It was amazing to see what it would have been like for an immigrant, and a mill worker.  Our tour guide Mike was great!  It was interesting to see many artifacts from various countries, and to read many of the reasons that immigrants would have come to Lowell.  It was also very sad to see the conditions that the mill girls would have had to work in.  What an amazing trip!  Thank you Mrs. Campbell, Mrs. Barber and Mrs. Evans for coming with us!

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog!  We are very excited to get it underway. Check in often to see what we have been up to.  Leave us comments, and we will check them regularly.  We hope that you enjoy our new blog!