Getting Ready for the Test!

One new thing for me as a third grade teacher is the state test. It's the first time my 8 year olds have had to take a test, and the first time I've had to give one!

Our team does a "Boot Camp" each year to help the kids review and feel more comfortable for the test. I have found some awesome things on Teachers Pay Teachers to help out with this. It was my teams' go to place for materials that were already made!

The first two days, I reviewed Antonyms and Synonyms, Poetry, and Author's Purpose with the different classes. (We figured it was easier to rotate classes so we wouldn't all have to teach everything.)

Of course, I forgot to take picture of this, but to review poetry I used these Shel Silverstein task cards from teacherteacher. I also used my Poetry Posters to review poetry terms. 

To review Author's Purpose, the kids hid these Task Cards by Rachel Lynette around the room and searched for them as they filled out their recording sheet.  That made answering the questions much more fun. My rules were that it had to be within reach and the words needed to be facing outwards.

To review antonyms and synonyms, I did a couple of things. First, we watched a video on Brain Pop Jr. (I think you need a subscription like our district has to watch this one.

Then, I gave them each a name tag. They greeted each other by either an antonym or synonym of their name tag. You can download the labels I made for free. They are for Avery label 8160 I believe. It does repeat on the bottom since I didn't need 30 different words. The kids really enjoy walking around to music, stopping when it stops, finding a partner, and then following whatever instructions I give them. This really is a great structure for anything you are teaching if you want to give it a try!

Last, they hid and answered more of Rachel Lynette's task cards for antonyms and synonyms.

I will be back soon to let you see how we reviewed Growing Patterns, Table and Charts, and Measuring.

Have a great weekend!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Finding Perimeter and Area on the Walls!

To make perimeter and area just a little bit more fun, one of my sweet colleagues came up with the idea of taping the walls with interesting shapes.

We had seen the original idea of taping the floor, but since we have tile walls, it seemed like it would stay better on there. 

The tape had been up for about a week and my students kept asking when they were going to get to do that! Nothing better than a little suspense to get them excited, right?

Anyway, needless to say, my students loved it!

If you want to know about using QR codes for more than just linking to websites (Hint: They can display text, too!) then check out my post over at Classroom DIY. It will be live tomorrow morning at 6:00 am CST. Let me know if you end up visiting!

 

Have a wonderful rest of the week!

Free 3rd Grade Geometry Vocabulary Cards

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and a happy new year!

I'm back and very excited about sharing my ideas, lessons, freebies, and technology tidbits.

As a start, here's one for you!

With my Dual Language 3rd graders, I've noticed how helpful it is to have vocabulary cards with pictures. Because of that, I've been creating math vocabulary cards for various topics. I was able to use the cards I created during the Debbie Diller book study a while ago. You can check those out here and here. (The first one is a freebie, so go ahead and grab it!)

I needed cards for line, line segment, parallel lines, intersecting lines, area and perimeter though. So, I created them and have them here free for you! Enjoy!

Turning Off Spell Check on the iPad

Can you believe we've already made it to Thanksgiving Break? This year has flown by for me!

 

If you're like me, I have a hard time taking a true grammar or spelling grade from things done on the iPad because of the auto-correct spelling. I love an app called ScribblePress for students to publish their books, but I have a hard time taking a spelling grade from it because I don't know what the iPad fixed for them automatically.

 

Well, guess what? Maybe most of you already knew this, but I just discovered yesterday how to turn off different spell check and auto-correct options on the iPad.

 

Take a look at the pictures below for a quick and easy tutorial!

 

First, go to "Settings".

 

 

 

Next, be sure you are on the general tab and scroll down.

 

 

Click on "Keyboard".

 

 

 

From there you can turn various things on or off.

 

 

 

I turned off the auto-correct spelling, auto-capitalization, and split keyboard (because that one drives me nuts!)

 

I left the check spelling option on, though, because I do want my students to be aware that something is spelled wrong. It will still shows the red squiggly line under misspelled words if the app supports it.

 

On that note, an app that I talked to y'all about earlier this summer called Popplet is great for lots of reasons. For one thing, it's an easy way for kids to create different kinds of mind maps. The other thing I like is that the app doesn't check spelling at all, so it really gives a true picture of where the students are with that.

 

Here is something my kids created with Popplet. It's a character map that requires them to infer what character traits the character displays and what the evidence is for that.

 

 

I hope you found a few things you can use!

 

In case you are wondering, I took a screenshot on my iPad by pressing the round home button and the power button at the same time. Then, I used Photo Skitch to highlight certain things in them for the quick tutorial.

 

Enjoy your Saturday!

What I'm Doing Digitally- 10.11.12



I am so excited to share with you that I have finally gotten my class blog started!   I had posted about doing that this summer, and I ended up using Kidblog. It's a site that my district already approved, and they are supposed to be coming out with an app very soon.   Of course, I got tired of waiting so long for the app to come out... so I just created a QR code for my kids to go to instead so they could log in easily.   Today we did our first posts. I wanted them all to experience how to post, and so we just wrote about our favorite part of third grade.   Some kids went on and posted about inferring or summarizing a story they were reading, but most have yet to do that.   I don't even have buttons ready to share, but I am so excited (and they are so excited) about having people besides the class, me and parents to read what they have to say. I just had to share it with you before I had any pictures, buttons or anything! I'd love it if you could read a couple of posts and comment for for one or two of my students. My expectation is that they will post something at least once a week. I'll also be including class photos of some things we were working on, too.   My first group's blog is here.   My second group's blog is here.   Please let me know if your class has a blog I can comment on. I'd love to support them and maybe even share it with my kiddos, too.   Let me know if you check it out. I would really love for my kids to realize how global their learning can be!   ... and please share if you have any ideas about what you would blog about with your kids. Right now, I'm kind of using it as our digital write about reading notebook.

Rounding with a Free Extension Project

Has the year been flying by for anyone else? I feel like I just blinked and we are already at the 7th week of school!

 

 

Our school is doing a book study on the book called Making Differentiation a Habit  by Diane Heacox. It really is an easy read with lots of practical ideas. I don't mind reading the theory behind things sometimes, but I really appreciate when books like this one give you plenty of ideas that you can implement right away.

 

 

Anyway, after reading the first 3 chapters I was inspired to think about my kiddos who would get rounding really quickly. They had never been taught how to round before, but I knew that there would be a handful after a mini-lesson or two who would already get it and be ready for a challenge. So, I created a little test (very short, but covered the things they needed to know) for those that wanted to try and test out of the rest of the rounding lessons. If they did it all correctly without any help, they could work on our MacBooks on the ToysRUs project.

 

I created a project (inspired by something the 4th graders at our school were doing with Carmax.com) where students were to imagine that an 8 year-old was coming to a new family in the US and had no toys yet. They were supposed to figure out what the parents should buy within their budget and use rounding to come up with the total cost and a calculator to compare the rounded total with the actual total.

 

My students who did the project really enjoyed it. They wanted to work on it any chance they had. 

 

You can download it for free here!

 

I plan on making more of these projects to go along with addition/subtraction, geometry and other units we cover in math. My kids keep asking if they will have another chance to work on an extension project.

 

I'll be sure and post the rest here and on TPT. If you don't check blogger often, you may want to follow my TPT store to stay updated!

 

For my students that didn't test out of rounding, I was able to spend time with them as a smaller group working on the areas they were still confused about.

 

One of the games they still ask to play is my Robot Rounding Bump. It comes with 4 different game boards and is only $2.50.

 

Have a great weekend!