Exciting times in Room 21

I am happy to report that all third graders made it through the last-ever administration of the Connecticut Mastery Tests unscathed! We kept the focus on "Personal Best" and as long as each one could tell me with honesty that he/she had done personal best work there wasn't anything more I could ask of them. We celebrated completions some days with a token reward, a game day, and finally yesterday a movie day!
Now on to some very exciting news in the classroom! Mrs Crawford's students and my students have been partners to work together as a tribe. My classroom is the Iroquois tribe. The students in Mrs. Crawford's classroom are the Sioux tribe. We have borrowed laptop carts from fourth and fifth grade so that each student can work with one other partner to research. What makes this even more exciting is once the research is done students will be creating slide shows to teach the other classroom about their tribe. We have focused on eight different aspects of culture that will comprise the slide show:  Location, Diet, Clothing, Shelter, Arts and Crafts, Government and Religion, and Interesting Facts. Some questions to ask your child about the research project are: what aspects of culture have they have had luck researching on line, do they find researching on line different than reading a book, and how do they feel more or less creative using technology? Look forward to our slide show on the blog later on this month.
We have done some fantastic text comparisons using four George Washington Biographies. First we read Who Was George Washington?, a full life biography that was written in a narrative style. This book included many text features (anecdotes, time line, maps, fantastic diagrams and more)  that really helped us get to know George Washington. The second text was called Farmer George Plants a Nation. This was a specialized biography that focused on George Washington as a farmer, scientist and inventor. It discussed the way George took the plantation of Mount Vernon from a barren plot of land to a large working farm that was completely self sufficient. The tone was serious and there were very high level words used on every page. The third book was George Did It! This book was a humorous account of George Washington's inauguration. Did you know there were orangutans floating in a boat on the Potomac river while George took the oath of office? This book gave lots of information form diary entries and used lots of author's craft like repetition. The final book, George Washington's Teeth, was a poem! It told us in detail of one of George Washington's biggest struggles…keeping his teeth! We learned that he had a set of false teeth made of hippopotamus tusks.
When we were done comparing the books we thought about which book helped each of us learn the most about George Washington and which author's style did we prefer. I asked the students to rate this set of lessons using the four books by holding up a fist to five. (fist which equals a zero, worst lessons ever, to 5 fingers which equals best lessons ever) I am happy to report everyone voted 4 or 5! So feel free to talk it up with your students on the topic of George Washington!