Third Grade with Room Nine: Dictionaries, Applesauce, skyping and other shenanigans in Room Nine

What a week! -- I feel like I say this every week.. but things are flying by so fast, and sometimes, things are such a blur... but we are surviving... it feels slow, but in the scheme of things, they are going by so fast.

I wanted to share our Synonym flowers from last week.. They're so cute and we've received many compliments. Of course, I stole the initial idea from Pinterest, but we tweaked it to make it our own! :)

We continued this week with multiplication and division, and area. We did some fun activities, including making arrays with our bodies, measuring our tables to find area, drawing equal groups and using skittles to multiply and divide within our equal groups.

On Tuesday, we used our skills with functional text to read a recipe and we made homemade applesauce! It was so much fun and everyone loved it! :) AND, our classroom smelled extra yummy!

We had two new mystery skypes this week! We skyped with an all-girls school in Dallas, Texas and an elementary school from a small town in Nebraska. Mystery Skpying has been such a fun thing for us, and it is really awesome to watch my kids work together to problem solve, and they are learning to ask proper and appropriate questions and really work with the maps to find the location of our new friends.

I am excited to introduce mystery number skyping in the next few weeks! It will be great exposure to working with numbers for the kiddos who struggle with number sense. They seem excited about it too!

We have made Skype much more of a privilege now. The kiddos have to earn the right to participate in the next mystery skypes from now on. I hope this will help them to realize how much of a privilege it is to participate in these cool activities, and that it just isn't given to them because they are in my class --- I want them to learn that they have to earn it.

Next week, we continue with multiplication and division, and functional text. We also hope to dive more into inflectional endings in words, and syllable routines!

I can't believe next week brings us into November already. We are almost to a 3 day weekend, and then a long week for Thanksgiving. Trucking on through, and making progress where we can.

I am blessed to have some pretty amazing people in my life who have reminded me this weekend that even though I am teaching standards and assessing on standards, I am also teaching my students valuable life lessons, I am introducing them to success, and providing a safe environment for them to learn. I hope that these things continue throughout the school year; these kiddos sure are teaching me just as much as I am teaching them.

I'll end this week's blog post with a video one of my twitter followers shared about bullying created by middle school students. How creative, unique and inspiring!

***This is an edit***

I wanted to add some pictures of our first classroom book! :) We have been working on these fiction stories for a few weeks now. They had to pre-write, write, edit, and publish before they could type into Kidblog. They then printed and drew illustrations to match their stories. The common theme is that the setting for each fiction story is a school. Hence, the title of the book! :)
They have such unique and creative minds, and sometimes, that is missed because of their lack of writing skills in the English language. I can't wait for them to see the finished product and to see what their peers wrote. I love when they give each other praise and boost confidence! :)