Splish, Splash, We're Off To Celebrate Our MCA-Testing Success!

After weeks and weeks of dilgent preparation and practice--as well as some extremely hard work on the part of the students themselves--and then several more weeks of individual testing itself, all of the third graders have finally finished up with the required MCA assessments. And with the final results tallied and recorded, there is absolutely no question that in addtion to continuing to be a close and careful readers, all of those test-taking skills and strategies were certainly put to good use!

Some of those classroom skills and strategies discussed and practiced over that past couple of months included the following tips and/or recommendations:

*This is neither a race nor a competition. Take your time and read the passage closely and carefully as a good reader would.

*After reading the entire passage once, go back and reread it again, just as carefully and closely as you did the first time. If necessary, reread it again, until you are sure you understand what the text is about.

*When it comes to answering posed questions on the test, first eliminate all possible answers that do not apply to the given question.

*Go back and find the specific portion of the text that refers to the posed question and find the actual answer to that question as it appears in the text itself.

In recognition for a job well done, students are spending a few well-earned hours away from the classroom tomorrow, April 28th, to have some fun with friends and fellow classmates during a trip to New Ulm's Vogel Arena Pool.  Following that, we're off to enjoy a school-packed bag lunch at Herman Heights Park.

 

Congratulations to all! Way to show your Sleepy Eye Pride Third Graders!

Flashback Friday

So much to do, so very little time! Come this time of year--at least in third grade anyway--such always seems to be the case, starting in February and continuing on into the middle of May, when students and teachers alike spring forward toward the conslusion of yet another successful year of school. As with anything, when busy and engaged, something else tends to take a backseat for a bit; hence, the need for our accumulative update!

*Jump Rope For Heart
February, the month most commonly devoted to romance and matters of the heart, is also the time when K-6th graders turn their attention to our annual heart-health campaign. An initiaive and national fund-raising event sponsored by the American Heart Association and the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (AAHRERD) whose purpose is to educate elementary and middle-school kids about their own hearts and heart health through heart-healthy endeavors, including a wide range of physical activities. Here at Sleepy Eye Elementary, one of those discussed physical activities spotlighted is jumping rope. An all-inclusive gathering that not only helps to improve students' own heart-healthy habits but also assists in helping to raise monies to benefit children who suffer from heart-health related issues.

*Literacy Night
Keeping with the month's theme, February also marks our "I Love To Read" celebration, during which time we focus on the importance of reading and the fun and impact it can and does have on not only avid readers, but also anyone who has ever picked up a book. This month-long acknowledgement is always capped off with our own Literacy Night, which is open to all students and their families.

In addition to providing an opportunity for students, parents, and siblings to share some quality time with one another while enjoying our menu selection of walking tacos, students and their siblings were also encouraged to browse through the grade-appropriate book choices offered and then chose a title that appealed to them and take it home to enjoy with family and friends. Families were also able to partake in the many other activities provided that evening as well, including a bookmark- making station, a game room, a read-a-loud session, as well as the photo-taking booth--the latter of which proved to be THE hit of the night!

Just as successful were the library-based padlet book recommendations prepared by our students, offering advice and suggestions to their fellow classmates regarding potential future book choices, based upon their own previous reading experiences. Students also enjoyed walking the "Author Hall of Fame", located in the hallway between the office and the cafeteria. Here students and their families were provided with ipads and headphones, and with the help of some very competent high school volunteers, were invited to learn a plethora of information and facts about a dozen different popular children's authors via the "Yak It" and "Aurasma" apps.

A special note of thanks to all of our volunteers as well as the third-grade students who prepared the vocal recordings for all of our featured authors. Great way to show your Sleepy Eye Pride!

Third-Grade Photocard Project: Narrative Writing at Its Very Best!

It's one thing to read fictional stories. It's quite another to actually write your own fictional work as third graders soon found out during their recent reading unit, featuring narrative writing. However, as you will soon see, success was achieved, following a month's worth of hard work and the necessary literary instruction!

As part of this unit, students continued to pay due diligence to the importance of plot and its five primary elements, including the required rise in action en route to solving any story's central problem. At the same time, they also engaged in studying the different parts of speech and how those specific components then translated into actual word choices, especially with respect to description writing. The exact same sort of writing needed for this unit's own narrative writing Photocard Project.

In addition, students also learned the difference between "showing" verses "telling" when writing, and that it's almost always far better to "show" than it is to simply "tell". The importance of dialogue as a means of "showing" was examined, too, with demonstrations on the proper use and placement of quotes within their own work. Instruction was also provided with respect to the correct usage of quotation marks as well.

However, as is almost always the case, it was the study of figurative language that really grabbed and held the third-graders attention. Their fascination with any, and really all, of the seven forms of figurative language--simile, metaphor, personification, alliteration, hyperbole, idiom, and onomatopoeia--is clearly evident in terms of recognition when read but also, as you will soon see, within their own personal writing.

After scrolling through what once was a collection of old Christmas cards that have since been transported onto the iPad, each student was asked to choose a card that somehow inspired them in some way, shape, or form. They were then asked to write a narrative story centered around the picture on their given card of choice, making sure to use all of the points of study mentioned above. Not only were students able to gain a better understanding of the writing process itself, they were also able to acquire valuable first-hand working knowledge regarding the importance of the editing and rewriting processes as well. Once completed, each third-grader's work was then published using the Photocard app.

"Plotting" Right Along...

Whew, January just seemed to fly right by, as did our month-long reading unit, featuring the study of story plots. And who better to help students with that than world-renown British children's author Roald Dahl, whose lifetime wealth of work includes the following title selections: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox, George's Marvelous Medicine, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The BFG, The Twits, and The Witches. All read and enjoyed by our third-grade students throughout the month in conjunction with their examination of the five elements of plot itself--exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and solution.

Once familiar with these core principles and how they actually pertained to the works of a master storyteller such as Dahl--who lays claim to over 200 million copies in print--students were then asked to apply their own knowldege of plot in another way. Using "Google Search", each student was asked to find images that represented all five of the aforementioned components of plot. After locating all of the needed visualizations, students then chose between one of two apps--Animoto or Adobe--to create individual plot videos.

History Comes Alive at Sleepy Eye Elementary!

 The third-graders stood scattered across the cafeteria like silent soldiers, dressed and ready to recite the carefully prepared speeches they had researched and written about their own historically significant person of choice. Each student proudly sporting a homemade rendition of clothing meant to exemplify that of which their iconic figure might have been found wearing, just waiting to share what they had learned with anyone willing to push the simple "button" facsimile--a red sticker-- hastily affixed to their chests.

Such was the scene on January 8th at Sleepy Eye Elementary's annual Third-Grade Wax Museum--a one-day event culminating the end of the students' biography/autobiography genre reading unit. A core curriculum exercise that required each third-grader to use a wide variety of media sources in order conduct research on their chosen topic person. Once the actual investigative portion of the process was completed, students then assembled their notes, turning them into a well-crafted speech written from the first-person point of view.

According to all who attended--including school staff, fellow students (K-12) as well as family and friends--an excellant job was done by all.  Way to show your Sleepy Eye Pride third-graders!
  

Tis the Season of Giving!

The holiday season marks a time to give and receive gifts. We all know the exhilarating feeling we get when we run down to the tree and see that Santa has made his annual deposit of gifts. We rip into them, hearts racing...beaming smiles lighting up the room. Sometimes we seem to forget however that there are some people in this world that are less fortunate than we are. In fact, some of those people may be our neighbors and friends. That is why at Sleepy Eye Schools we make it a priority to give back by holding an annual food collection appropriately titled "The Giving Tree." The collection simply entails spending the entire month of December collecting food items to be donated to our local food shelf. Through the collection, we help to teach the importance of generosity and being selfless toward others. If you ask your child they should know what those terms mean as we discuss them often in class...especially this time of year.

Giving to the Giving Tree is a fun and rewarding experience for all students and one that we celebrate. As a way to reward students for all their hard work and generosity, we hold a party in the gym where we sing karaoke to popular Christmas carols while also enjoying the company others. This year we collected over 1,040 items to help feed our community through the holiday season and beyond. What an excellent way to close out 2015 and usher in the new year.


Merry Christmas everyone! Have a safe and enjoyable holiday season!

Amazing Auras Make Santa Come to Life

As you can see from many of our posts, technology is a huge part of the learning process in our third grade classrooms. The project featured in this next post is no exception. Each year, as a part of our writing curriculum, we write persuasive paragraphs to go along with Santas that were disguised as a part of a family project given over Thanksgiving break. However, just displaying our writing and Santas for all to see was not good enough. We instead decided to make Santa jump off the page...and not just through our amazing writing skills but through the use of technology! For this particular project, we used multiple apps to achieve the end product. This is a technique called app smashing which allows us to bring a one-dimensional, paper image of Santa to life.

As stated above, students were first asked to disguise a printed-form of Santa in a way that he wouldn’t be recognized as himself. Once we’d finished with our decorations and/or embellishments, we then learned about persuasive writing, with each student writing a persuasive paragraph to convince their reader that their colored image of Santa was, in fact, not Santa. Next, we applied an app called “Yak It” in order to make our disguised Santa figures talk. The video outcome of this was then created as an overlay to their actual Santa image, using the “Aurasma” app. When engaged with this particular app, each individual Santa was brought to life, speaking to the listener as he—the disguised Santa—presented his argument, in the voice and written words of its corresponding paragraph author—as to why he is not the actual Santa but, in reality, someone else! 

Click on the clip below to see the outcome.