6/8/2017 June 8, 2017It's the End of the Year - Already! It has been a joy to work with the enthusiastic third graders this year. They have always been eager to learn and try new things and I have seen them grow in so many ways.
Our Type to Learn subscription will be coming to an end in the middle of June, and we are planning a subscription that is entirely web-based for the coming year. Stay tuned for more information on that.
Students are welcomed and encouraged to write posts for their blogs over the summer. Read a good book? Have a fun experience? Travel somewhere exciting? Tell us about it! Please help them to proof read before hitting the SUBMIT button. I will check periodically for any submitted posts but I will not approve posts or comments that have not been carefully written. No photos should be uploaded that contain student or family member faces or other identifying information. I wish all of you a safe and happy summer vacation. It has been my pleasure to learn along with your wonderful children this year! 5/20/2017 May 20th, 2017To coincide with their reading of Charolotte's Web, third graders created Word Art for a character or some element of the story. They created a list of key words and then used the site to create their images. They did downloading and uploading to put the image into a blog post. You can check out the Charlotte's Web word art on our blog site. Each student also learned how to embed a video into the blog. We looked at HTML code to see what a browser actually reads in order to display a web page. Each third grader embedded the Shel Silverstein video that he or she worked on. After studying Shel Silverstein poetry in April, they worked as teams to narrate a poem and draw or color clip art that would help to tell the story visually. I combined their narration and images into videos. Please read their Shel Silverstein posts and watch their videos if you have not had the chance to do so. As always, they would love comments from readers. Please let them know you have read about their various projects. Every blogger wants to hear from a reader to know that what is being shared has been seen.
The videos are also combined into a playlist which you can access below. 5/12/2017 May 12, 2017Where did April go? I never posted any information for the month of April!
Third graders have been very busy and have published their recent work to their blogs. We spent time on the Minibeasts site, not just to learn about invertebrates which was a science topic for third grade, but also to create some wild insects and practice copy and paste skills. Students saved a snip of their "superbug" and inserted it into a post along with the description of this new creation and how well it would survive in the wild. We also used this opportunity to find out about the numeric keypad and the built in calculator on the computer, and used it to calculate not only individual superbug scores, but also to compute the average score for the class. We did an average score because there was not the same number of students in each group. 3B was the winner by a very small margin. 3/28/2017 March 28, 2017During the month of March third graders worked on charting. We practiced by doing a survey in class of birthday months and created a chart together using Google spreadsheets. Students learned about entering data and using the tools in the application to create a chart and format it to make it attractive to read. Then they took data gathered during math class on the "favorites" survey they conducted among their classmates. They had already completed a picture graph of this data and now used Google Spreadsheets to turn it into a column chart. They have shared their charts in their blogs, so please be sure to visit and leave a comment. You can find all the chart entries under the Charting Favorites category. In Language Arts students were writing bio poems following a special format to describe themselves. You can find these under the Bio Poems category. Here is Autumn's bio: Autumn
Cheerful,nice,creative Who enjoys her friends Who is able to dance Who feels happy Who wonders how animals talk to other animals Who fears clowns Who cares about her family and friends Who dreams of flying 2/7/2017 February 7, 2017Today third graders finished their Magic Beans and Magic Keys posts. Through the course of this activity we have worked on a variety of word processing skills. Using keyboard shortcuts to cut and paste, they rearranged the events in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. An intro to the scribble tool in the Microsoft drawing tools had them designing their own bean, and then using ctrl + d to duplicate the beans. Beans were then formatted using line and fill tools. The beans were then snipped and saved as a PNG file. Finally students took turns adding sentences to a Google Doc via Google Voice Typing. It allowed them to see how enunciation matters in dictation. Today they used ctrl +c to copy the saved text from the group narration and add it to their post to share their learning and their beans. We hope you will visit the Magic Beans and Magic Keys posts and leave a comment for them. They have worked hard on acquiring a number of new skills. 1/22/2017 January 22, 2017We started off the new year getting back into keyboarding and continuing with coding at the Code Studio website. We will revisit coding from time to time throughout the remainder of the year. If you have not considered downloading the Type to Learn software at home to allow your student to continue keyboarding practice outside of our limited class time, I would encourage you to consider it. It is a large program but completely free to use and progress will be recorded whether the student works at home or at school. Please see Keyboarding on this site for download instructions. It is important to encourage good posture and correct home row finger position at home as well. Some students who are using the program at home have made great progress through the lessons. One problem for many third graders is keeping fingers on the home row. I move around the room helping them with this but if left to their own devices and unsupervised they are going to revert to incorrect finger positions. There are many free online programs as well but the methodology and game based environment as well as progress tracking in the TTL4 program makes this our program of choice. Last week we did a refresher on cut and paste with Jack and the Beanstalk, an activity in which students used ctrl+ x and ctrl + v to rearrange the parts of the story. We will continue with the Jack and the Beanstalk theme next week as we explore Microsoft Drawing tools and formatting as well as the duplicating process. We will also experiment with Google Voice typing. It may be a few more weeks until we have a finished product for a blog post. Keyboard by User:Cy21 under CC BY-SA 3.0
Beanstalk by Clker - Free-Vector-Images under CC0 Public Domain 12/11/2016 December 11, 2016For our class this past Tuesday students were introduced to Computer Science Education Week and viewed two videos showing how important computer science has become in our daily lives and for solving the world's problems. We then experimented with coding for the HOUR OF CODE. We worked together as a class to learn the process of moving coding blocks into the workspace and then running the program we had created. We are using Blockly, which is a collection of coding blocks that contain JavaScript code, to program a sequence of events. Because there were millions of students around the world using the Code.org servers for Hour of Code, we were advised that student progress would not be saved during that week, which is why we worked as a group. For our next class students will work through a sequence of coding challenges at their own pace on Code Studio. 11/20/2016 November 20, 2016This past week third graders learned keyboard shortcuts for cut (ctrl + x) and paste (ctrl + v) as well as undo (ctrl + z). We will continue to practice these shortcuts with other activities and add more keyboard shortcuts as the year progresses. We are also planning a book review special project based on the novel recently completed, Sarah Plain and Tall. Some parents have visited their son or daughter's blog to read the most recent post "Simile Portrait". In Language Arts class students were learning about similes and described themselves using similes. They then drew their own self-portrait which was photographed and uploaded for insertion into their post. If you have not done so yet, please visit and leave a comment for your own child or several others as well. I do have one request regarding comments. If you are a parent, please do not leave your last name with your comment as we do not wish to publish students' last names on the blog. We are on first name basis only. Entering your name as "Mom" or "Katherine's Dad" is perfectly fine. It does take a little time to copy and re-create the comment to eliminate the last name if it has been entered. All comments are approved by me before going live. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! 10/25/2016 October 25, 2016We have been working on using the snipping tool and inserting an image into a blog post. While typing sentences third graders were reminded about punctuation and capitalization. Our Wild Thing posts are published and ready for our readers to enjoy. We used the Build Your Wild Self website to create some wild costumes, just in time for Trick or Treat. Some students have been anxious to write comments, but I will be teaching them that there are certain good practices to follow with commenting. More on that later! Please click on the category "I Am a Wild Thing" on the third grade class blog to enjoy their creations and leave a comment! 9/29/2016 September 29, 2016This week the students were introduced to our keyboarding program, Type to Learn 4. Please read my message regarding keyboarding skills at OLPH. You are also encouraged to download the program (free) for home use. This is the last year that we will be using the downloadable program as Type to Learn 4 is moving to a strictly web-based platform. It is a very large download so you will need to be sure that you have 1 GB of space available. Remember, this is entirely optional! If a student logs in at home the program will pick up with the lesson last worked on in school. Students will not be "graded" on keyboarding, just encouraged to do their best and try to develop correct finger position as well as posture. For some students at this age the finger dexterity is just not present yet but everyone will develop at his or her own pace. The program is self-leveling, so students who need more time on a particular lesson will not be moved forward until mastery is achieved. It is a fun program with many games built into the lessons and students have always enjoyed using it. We are hoping to move toward using all fingers rather than just two! |