Read to Your Baby: A Community Service Project

This year in Mrs. Thoman's class we completed a community service project to work on real world, persuasive writing. As a class, we worked to persuade new parents to read to their babies.

 

We used the computers on wheels to complete our research under the guidance of Mrs. Harvey. We were able to read and listen to several articles that outlined the most important reasons to read to babies.

 

 

Students took notes with a partner.

 

They used their notes to write a persuasive letter addressed to new parents.

 

Each student also got a board book that they practiced reading aloud. Mrs. Harvey recorded each student reading their book and put together a CD with each book read aloud.

 

The next step was to create a CD case. The students were able to create a CD cover in the computer lab with Mrs. Harvey.

Finally, our projects were complete! We had an opportunity to share them with Dr. Tower and our classmates.

Morgan explains the project to Dr. Tower.

Mrs. Harvey led a small group where the students we able to listen to each others stories.

Mrs. Thoman led a small group where students shared their persuasive letters and board books with their classmates.

Mrs. Tremblay led the gift decorating center. The students created cards for the new parents and selected their gift bags.

 

 We are very proud of the work that the 3T students put into this community service project. They are already wondering who will get the gifts and if the babies will like their new books.

 

The gift bags are all ready to go!

We had a wonderful time creating this project. We hope that all the new parents who receive a gift bag share the stories with their babies and inspire future generations of readers!

 

 

Reader's Theater

First Hand Immigrant Experiences

As part of our immigration unit, we had two parents come to talk to our class about their experiences immigrating to America.

Mrs. M spoke about coming to America from St. Petersburg, Russia. She brought a book about St. Petersburg, a Russian Flag, and a Russian nesting doll to share with our class.

Mrs. I told us about immigrating to America from Ghana. She spoke about moving to America to attend college and how different life is in America. She brought a hand carved drum to share with the class.

 

We have enjoyed learning about immigration and will be learning more about the Industrial Revolution during our field trip on Tuesday.

Mike Lupica

Sports author, Mike Lupica came to our school to talk about how he got ideas for his books. He gave the boys in the crowd a little life lesson. He instructed the boys to always let their future wives be right. Anthony disagreed with Mr. Lupica and got a private lesson in front of the of the audience.

Our class had a chance to ask lots of questions which Mr. Lupica graciously answered.

Ava even mustered up the courage to ask for his autograph!

Biography Projects

Our biography projects were a success! Each of us chose an important historical figure and practiced our researching skills.

 

We chose scientists, researchers and inventors, magicians and sports heroes, political figures and artists. Some of our people are still alive and some were born thousands of years ago.

 

After conducting our research we created artifacts that represented our person. Some of us even dressed up as the person we researched!

Each of us presented our report in front of the class.

Finally, we welcomed our parents to come take a look at our projects.

 

We are all proud of our hard work on the biography project!

 

 

Exploding Volcanoes!

After constructing our volcanoes only one thing was left to do...EXPLODE them! Our volcanoes were all different sizes and shapes so we had fun making predictions about if and how they would explode.

Team One

 

 

Team Two

 

 

Team Three

 



 

Team Four

 

Pizza Party!

As a class we decided to keep track of our WEB reading hours. We challenged ourselves to log 225 hours of reading as a class. Each week, we counted our minutes and converted the minutes to hours. We started off strong...

 

 

And continued strong...

 

 

And we earned our pizza party even earlier than we expected to! On a Friday, we dined at the Thoman/Call Pizzeria. We listened to some Italian opera classics and gobbled up lots of pizza!

We are going to keep counting our WEB reading hours to try to earn an ice cream party next time!



The Evolution of Volcanoes

In the story, Dogzilla by Dav Pilkey, a dog emerges from a volcano to terrorize the city of Mouseopolis. We wanted to know more about volcanoes so we read a non-fiction text to learn about the parts of a volcano. Then we had the opportunity to build our own volcanoes using some clay and a flower pot.

We painted our volcanoes with watercolors.

The finished products!

All that was left was to EXPLODE them!