Another Busy Week!

Team Esprit continued their learning about Geometry this week and focused on polygons and quadrilaterals.  We spent some time sorting shapes, building them with geoboards, and playing a game called "Guess My Quadrilateral".   Next week we will continue our work with geometry and we will revisit perimeter and area.





We finished reading Because of Winn Dixie this week and had great discussions about the lessons learned by Opal and other characters in the book.  We also spent some time analyzing the author's craft. We are now moving into another book called Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel by Nikki Grimes.  We will use this book to compare and contrast characters, their problems, and their reactions.

In Writer's Workshop we are busy publishing our final copies of our adapted fairy tales.  Next week Miss Deb's class will have share their adapted fairy tales with their Kindergarten book buddies. Today, Miss Deb's class visited Miss Megan's first grade class and listened to her students share their writing pieces.

Miss Deb's class also enjoyed a terrific Hands On Nature lesson this week about birds.  We listened to different bird calls and songs and played games to practice recognizing various birds by their calls and songs. A huge thank you to Erica Schramm, Anne Marcoe and Christi Koenig for another great learning experience.  Miss Niles' class will enjoy this same lesson next week.


Miss Niles' class enjoyed Fiber Art Friday today!  Bradie taught the children how to knit using their hand-crafted knitting needles.  Thanks to Anita, Martha, Johnine for teaching us as well!

This Tuesday, April 18th will be the dress rehearsal for our team's "Music Informance".  The Informance will take place at 8:40 in the cafeteria on Wednesday, April 19th.  We hope you all can make it!
Have a great weekend!
Deb and Jenn

Happy April!

Thank you to everyone for coming in for Parent Conferences last month.  It was nice to connect and celebrate your child's accomplishments this year!  Please note that the 3rd graders have a Music Informance on April 19th at 8:40am.  Please contact Amy Southworth with any questions. We hope to see you there!

In Writer's Workshop, the children have begun writing their Fairy Tale adaptations.  They are using their storyboard as plans and are drafting stories using narration and dialogue. As the children are writing, they are encouraged to elaborate with details to make the story come to life for the reader.  What is your child writing about?  Is it an adaptation of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, or Three Billy Goats Gruff?

We are almost finished reading Because of Winn-Dixie.  This week we focused on exploring secondary characters in a story.  These are the characters that are not the main focus of the story, but have some effect on the main character.  We found in our reading that secondary or supporting characters can act as advisers (giving advice), sidekicks (friends), or challengers (antagonists).  See if your child can tell you about the secondary characters in Because of Winn-Dixie. What role do Gloria, Otis, and Franny Block play?

In math, we began a Geometry unit.  This week we explored the term attributes and identified attributes of a variety of shapes. The children worked in partnerships to create a shape poster highlighting the attributes of special quadrilaterals:  squares, trapezoids, parallelograms, and rhombuses.  Ask your child if he or she can tell you about an attribute of one of these shapes.  We also learned about and explored tangrams.  Tangrams were invented in China hundreds of years ago and are a set of seven puzzle pieces called tans.  These tans (different shapes) can be combined to form a square.  It was quite a challenge to put them together into a square!

Have a good weekend!

Read Across America Day!

Today we celebrated Read Across America Day and Dr. Seuss' birthday!  We began the day with an assembly that celebrated books and reading.  We listened to a book read by SCS teachers and watched a music video with pictures of SCS children reading and our third graders singing!  We also had a visit from Champ and he delivered a book to each classroom! Each class then used its book to do a art project to decorate our school!  Be sure to ask your child about the book that his or her class received!  We also had a many different guest readers stop by our class today to read aloud.  It was a fantastic day of reading fun!

In math, we continue to work with multiplication and division; however, most of our work this week focused on division.  We learned two math games that involved division:  Line 'Em Up and Division Capture.  Line 'Em Up encouraged the use of an array as a model for division which helps deepen understanding of the operation.  Division Capture offered practice with basic division facts.  Ask your child if he or she can tell you about these games!

In Reader's Workshop, we continued to read Because of Winn Dixie and discuss our theories about the character Opal.  Just like strong readers, we used the information we know about Opal to make predictions about what actions Opal might take further along in the book.  We learned that Opal is the kind of child who opens her heart to everyone and is kind and friendly.  This has helped us to predict that she will continue to make more friends in her new town of Naomi, Florida and that she will not be lonely any more.  After practicing this strategy as a class, the children tried to make predictions about their characters in their independent reading books.


In Writer's Workshop, we had another visit from Susanna Olson, a Flynn teaching artist.  This week she helped us story tell the fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood.  Through actions, movements, and voices, the children had many chances to retell this well-known tale.  We then read adaptations, different versions, of Little Red Hood to prepare us for Susanna's next visit.  What adaptation might your child make to the original tale?

Have a great weekend!

A Very Short Week!

Storm Stella and the snow days it created made for a very short week for Team Esprit, but we still managed to pack in some great learning experiences.

Susanna, from the Flynn, returned on Monday to help us generate ideas for adapting Cinderella.  We discussed adapting the characters, the setting and the motivation.  We practiced moving around the classroom as the adapted characters we pulled from our imaginations and talked about how those characters are different than the characters in the original fairy tale.  We spent the rest of the week creating story boards for our own adaptations of Cinderella and look forward to beginning our writing next week.  The next fairy tale we will be adapting will be Little Red Riding Hood.

We have continued reading Because of Winn Dixie during Reader's Workshop and have been looking very closely at the character Opal.  We have been looking for patterns that support our ideas about her character traits and using those to come up with theories about her.  We are also practicing these skills in our own books.

Miss Niles' class enjoyed a Hands On Nature lesson about Trees in Winter. This month, we were tree detectives learning about twigs and branches and how to looking at their characteristics can help identify a tree. We also learned about how trees survive harsh winters!  Since it was a beautiful day, we had a chance to go outside and explore the trees in our school yard as well.  Can your child identify any trees in your yard? Miss Deb's class will learn about this on Friday, March 24th.




In Math, we continued to learn about division through division story problems and fact families. We also played a game of "What's Missing?" Bingo to become more efficient at solving our multiplication and division facts.

Lastly, Miss Niles' class had Fiber Art Friday with Bradie Hansen, Jacob's mom.  I loved the creativity of their new sock puppet friends!  Thanks Bradie!

 Have a great weekend!

Adapted Fairy Tales With Flynn Artist Susanna!

Esprit Third Grade kicked off our first week back with several new units.  One of those units is our Adapted Fairy Tales writing unit and we have been so lucky to have Susanna, from the Flynn, join us to support us with this unit.  Susanna will be joining us once a week for the month of March.  This week, Susanna helped us create a story board of the fairy tale Cinderella.  We practiced retelling the story of Cinderella several times using a variety of voices, gestures and movement.  We even practiced adding in sound effects.  We are working hard to gain a strong understanding of this story and the story elements so we can create better adaptations of this story.


We began reading Because of Winn Dixie during our Character Studies unit in reading.  We have been paying attention to what the main character, Opal, says and does to try to learn more about her and her character traits.  We look forward to getting to know Opal and the other characters in the book better as we continue to read this book.

We have been learning about the relationship between multiplication and division in our new math unit.  We have been practicing identifying two interpretations of division, sharing and grouping.  We have been using the array model and equal groups model to highlight the connection between multiplication and division.  As you can imagine, this has cause some disequilibrium with many students, but as the week has moved on and we have continued to explore these ideas through problem solving students have become more comfortable and their understanding is growing.  This is a good experience for them to develop their perseverance and learn that new learning sometimes takes time.

If you haven't already done so, please visit the Esprit conference schedule to sign up for your spring conference.  Conferences are just a couple weeks away!
Have a terrific weekend,
Deb and Jenn

Happy Winter Break!

This week the Esprit Team participated in Differences Awareness Day.  We listened to a panel of three people share with us about their disabilities.  Heidi, our first panelist, shared about her experiences being visually impaired.  Abby, our second panelist, shared about her experiences living with Autism and ADHD.  Our third panelist, our own Mr. D., shared about living with Cerebral Palsy.  When they were finished sharing we had an opportunity to ask them each some questions.  Later that morning we participated in disability simulations.  Be sure to ask your child about these simulations.  It was a wonderful experience for everyone.

Esprit has worked hard all week to finish our book projects and our non-fiction writing pieces. This morning Miss Deb's class shared their projects and writing pieces with Vasanthi's class and received many compliments about them.  This afternoon the Esprit Team enjoyed a Publishing Party to celebrate all the hard work we have done.  Miss Deb and Miss Niles' classes got together and shared their writing pieces with each other.  The celebration continued with popcorn and a short movie afterward.  Please be sure to have your child share their writing with you.  We have some excellent writers on the Esprit team!

We will begin new units in Math and Literacy after the Winter Break.  Our math unit will focus on multiplication, division and area.  Our writing unit will focus on adapted fairy tales and we are very fortunate to be working with the Flynn for this unit.  We will have four mornings with a Flynn artist who will help us retell fairy tales through acting and story boarding.  This will help us get to know the fairy tales very well so we can adapt them with our own writing.  In reading, we will be doing character studies using the book Because of Winn Dixie.
Have a terrific winter break!
Deb and Jenn

February Fun!

We had another very busy week in school!  We had a fantastic Valentine's Day celebration!  It was so fun to watch everyone deliver and exchange valentines and we certainly enjoyed our delicious snack. Thanks to all the families for contributing to our festive snack!  Also on Valentine's Day, we had our second Mix-It-Up Day.  During Mix-It-Up, our classes meet with another class of students and do an activity together.  This month's activity was a butterfly venn diagram.  Each third grader partnered up with a student from the other class and they talked about differences and commonalities between them.  They wrote this on a butterfly drawing and decorated their butterfly. These butterflies will eventually be used in a whole school art project that will decorate the front hallway!

We also had a special visit from the Vernon Tornadoes, an all-kid jump rope team from Southern Vermont. These children were amazing!! They did a 45- minute jump roping demonstration and then Miss Niles' class had the opportunity to do a workshop with the jump ropers during their P.E. class.  I think we might have some future jump ropers!!!!

We have been working very hard in our measurement unit in Math.  This week we spent a lot of time learning about fractions.  There was, and still is, a lot of disequilibrium about fractions.  We have been working hard to make connections with fractions using a variety of models.  This has included partitioning fractions and showing unit fractions on a number line.  It has also included comparing fractions and explaining why one fraction must be greater than, less than, or equal to another fraction.

A huge thank you to our Hands On Nature parents for teaching us about galls this week.  We enjoyed a terrific puppet show and then had opportunities to observe and dissect galls to see what was inside of them.  Ask your child what they found inside their gall!

We are currently finishing up our non-fiction unit in Reader's Workshop with a book project about biographies.  Students have been given a variety of book report projects to choose from to show their learning about a biography they have read.  These include, movie posters, cereal box reports, paper bag reports, and book jackets.  We plan to have these projects completed before our winter break.

On Tuesday, we will be celebrating Disability Awareness Day.  We will be attending a presentation by a community panel of people who have disabilities.  We will then spend some time experiencing disability simulations so we can better understand what it is like to have a disability.

Have a great weekend!
Deb and Jenn