A Little Bit of This.....A Little Bit of That.....

Wow! Have we been busy this week! Here are a few pics of what's been going on in our classroom.

We have had some trouble with catching on to rounding to the nearest ten and hundred. I started with the Rounding Rollercoaster that lots of you use. I also found several rhymes on the Internet to use, but like the one on the chart below the best. 

Mark the place. Look to the right.

Four or less, just sit tight.

Five and up, you add one more.

Now toss those "righties" out the door.

In those empty right-hand places,

Zeroes keep the proper places. 

(Click on the pic below to go to the original site for the poem.)

We also wrote the following chant (sung military-style):

1 2 3 4 (1 2 3 4)

They're little and small so make them fall (repeat)

5 6 7 8 and 9 (repeat)

They need to grow so make them more! (repeat)

Rounding! Rounding! Estimating! Estimating! Go! Go!

(I am now singing this in my sleep!)

The Helper chart I posted before just wasn't working out. I decided to simplify it so that I have two helpers instead of every child having a job. Those two students run errands, take lunch count, whatever needs to be done. Since we sit in groups of students, each group has a table boss. These students come get any papers or supplies I need to hand out to all students and take them back to their group. They also bring me work notes from home, lunch money, etc. I just wrote the names on the magnets I ordered from VistaPrint and attached them to the cookie sheets that are velcro-ed to my cabinet doors.

This is one of my favorite new things in my classroom. We have been talking about expectations and how we can make our work the very best it can be. We talked about cupcakes before the icing is added and how much better they are with icing! Each student then wrote on a pink post-it at least one way they can put the icing on their own cupcakes (work). They had great ideas!

Here is our character map of Robbie from How To Be Cool in Third Grade. One of our skills has been identifying characters and character traits.