Miss B., Busy Bee

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Crazy about Coordinates!

To learn about ordered pairs, we created coordinate grid pictures. It's hard to see here because my points are yellow and on the Promethean board, but you should be able to tell I created a house.

My students were given two templates, one for creating their own picture and another to list the coordinates on for their partner to use. The difference between that and their model was I used a map-like grid (with letters and numbers instead of just numbers) for this activity to cut down on confusion about the order of the points. My smarties noticed that this grid didn't start with 0 like the ones we usually use in math!

Then they had to switch papers with their partner and see if they drew the same picture!

Use this free worksheet maker to create your own and differentiate for your students!

I especially love how you can make hidden messages!

free graphing paper

free 4 quadrant graphing paper

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Super Goals and Souper Bowls!

Fresh off a NY Giants NFC East Championship this weekend, I decided to put a fun twist on my New Years bulletin boards. The theme was "Super Goals and Souper Bowls!" I did something similar around the time of the World Cup with soccer balls, so I thought football was only natural with the Super Bowl coming up! We've also been working on homophones, homonyms, and puns, so the kids got a kick out of the idea! (Haha...couldn't help myself!)

The background was created with green bulletin board paper, paper plates, napkins, a yardstick, and white chalk. It's so long I had to take 2 pictures (but it's really one piece of paper). I added the lines and stapled the paper to my bulletin boards after this picture was taken. We used some football-related clipart to write our academic or personal goals!

works in progress (I drew writing lines on them before photocopying)

Right after we did this, I found a great free graphic organizer that would have helped tons.

We used AlphaBits cereal and plastic spoons glued to paper bowls to spell out our goals.

Recipe for a fun: Alpha-Bits cereal (locate them near you here), Styrafoam bowls, plastic spoons, hot glue gun to glue plastic spoon to bowl, and paste to glue down cereal (It's hard to see with white bowls, but it looks like real milk, and some cereal bits even look wet!)

Picking out the letters is tough work because it doesn't appear that the box contains all 26! Tips from our class: turn a Z sideways for an N and backwards for a funky S. Bite the rounded part of a B off for an E and then turn it upside down for an M and right side up for a W. Break parts off of an L to make a T or and I. Find a slightly misshapen X to use as a K. Break off part of an O to make a C.

After some bowls were decorated with marker...the letters are cut out and ready for the bulletin board!

Practice basketball...think he was inspired by this week's Journeys story Jump?

Learn to swim

Hit a baseball...he was inspired by the Roberto Clemente story!

Learn ballet

And of course, some academic goals!

I think if our behavior is good for the rest of the month, we might just have an in-school Super Bowl party. I found some cute (and not so healthy, but hey...it's one day a year) food ideas on Pinterest:

Hopefully I'll be wearing this jersey on the big day, rooting on my G-men:

I also found these super cute football leg warmers to wear!

Update: The Giants DID WIN THE SUPERBOWL! In celebration, I have uploaded a free football flipchart! It includes a football words word wall and speculative writing prompt! :)

Monday, January 2, 2012

Reading Strategy: Using Context Clues to Infer Meaning

My students have gotten pretty good at using context clues to infer meaning because we practice, practice, practice! We use context clues in our Journeys Vocabulary Cards to find the meaning of unknown words at the beginning of the week. I also use the following resources:

Instructional Fair Inferencing

Cloze: Comprehension in Context

and last but not least, my favorite...

Mini Mysteries and More Mini Mysteries - great because kids make inferences from the clues in the story to solve a mystery!

(when I bought it, it didn't come with a CD to read along...I love this new addition!)

see how I use this in the class

I use the following books/series for my students to get independent practice: The Trial of Cardigan Jones, Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Babysitters Club Mysteries, and The Boxcar Children.

Click here for Inferencing Mini Lesson ideas.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Grade 3 Journeys Unit 3 Lesson 11 - Jump! From the Life of Michael Jordan

Our first Journeys reading story in Unit 3 is Jump! From the Life of Michael Jordan by Floyd Cooper. It's the story of Michael Jordan's childhood, and it is meant to inspire children to believe in the power of their dreams.

Videos of Michael Jordan playing for the Chicago Bulls of the NBA

Michael Jordan talking about working on jumping as a kid

1987 All-Star Slam Dunk Contest

some of the best slam dunk jumps of all time

A great pairing with this book is Dream Big: Michael Jordan and the Pursuit of Excellence by Deloris
Jordan, his sister. It's great to use as a primary source and to talk about how this book is written from first-person point-of-view, while Jump is written from third-person point-of-view.