Mr. Salsich's Class
Third Grade Explorations in Learning
Archive for General
Today is our last day of school before summer vacation!
We have had a great year together and have learned so many things. Luckily we have the blog to remember it all. You can always re-read posts, watch videos, or listen to voicethreads from the year by using the “tag cloud” or the archives on the sidebar.
Here is a slideshow with pictures from the first day of school right up until Field Day.
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Thanks to all of our blogging buddies, commenters, and followers that have helped us learn and given us support and ideas!
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What is one of your favorite memories from the year?
Do you have a favorite post, video, or voicethread from the blog this year?
A few week’s ago our classmate Anthony went to Hershey Park for a family vacation.
At Hershey Park in Pennsylvania
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Hershey Park is located in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was started in 1905 by Milton Hershey as a relaxing park for the people that worked at the Hershey Chocolate Company. Now it is a popular family theme park with roller coasters, water slides, and a zoo.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File%3AInfobox_collage_for_Hersheypark.jpg
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Here are some pictures from Anthony’s trip:
The chocolate Anthony made being boxed up at Chocolate World
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Racing bumper cars
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The Count's Splash Castle at Sesame Place - EVERYONE gets wet!
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Waves beat Anthony as he tries to save his glasses! Whooosh!
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Have you ever been to Hershey Park?
What is your favorite amusement park?
Would you rather go on a roller coaster or a water slide? Why?
The other day we created a Wordle. A wordle is made from a bunch of text that is entered into a program that arranges the words into different colors and shapes to make a design. The more times a word appears in the text, the bigger the word gets in a wordle.
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We decided to experiment with wordles by combining our names with the answers that we wrote to these questions:
What word would you use to describe our blog?
What word would you use to describe our classroom?
What word would you use to describe your classmates?
What is the most interesting thing in the classroom?
What is your favorite classroom subject?
What has been your favorite activity so far?
What was your favorite read-aloud book?
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When we entered all the text into a wordle this is what we got!
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(Click on the image to see it in full size.)
As you can see; awesome, fun, marble-maze, coyote, and reading were written down the most!
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What do you think of our wordle?
If you are in our class, explain your answer to one of the questions for the wordle.
How would you describe our blog?
We are very lucky to be part of a “Quad Blogging” partnership with three other amazing class blogs: Mrs. Yollis’ Classroom Blog, 4KM & 4KJ, and Open the Door to B4.
Quad Blogging 2012
This is our week to be the featured blog!
Welcome blog buddies!
Please explore our recent posts and leave a comment on one that is interesting to you. You can also explore older posts by using the Tag Cloud on the right-hand sidebar (the “inquiry” tag has some interesting posts!)
Also, here are a few popular posts from the past year:
Red Roosters Don’t Drink Rootbeer
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Right now we have 3,427 comments! I bet we will get our 3,500 comment this week. Maybe it will be your comment!
(Here’s a little math challenge: How many comments do we need to reach 3,500? How about 4,000? How did you figure it out?)
Thanks for visiting!
Today we started practicing for the World Education Games, which will officially take place March 6-8.
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Every year students from all over the world compete in friendly, 60 second competitions of math, spelling, and science. It is a great way to get faster at math, spelling, and keyboarding – and it is a lot of fun!
Competing against students near and far
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When we played today we played against students from as far away as South Africa and Malaysia, but we also played against some of our friends right in the classroom!
Competing with friends
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It will be fun to have practice games, and the real thing on March 6, 7, and 8 will be very exciting. Last year over 5 million students from over 215 countries combined to correctly answer 428,598,214 math questions! Wow! How many will we answer this year?
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Since part of the fun is seeing what country you will be playing against, we will keep track of the countries we have played against in the comments.
Let the games begin!
Click here (or in the Learning Links) to visit the website and login to compete with students all over the world.
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What do you enjoy about practicing for the World Education Games?
What countries have you competed against?
We have been spending a lot of time talking about how important it is to be thinking about your reading. Thinking while reading helps you comprehend (or understand) the book, so good readers are always thinking about what they read.
In our reading we have been focusing on these types of reading thoughts to help our comprehension:
- Making connections
- Predicting
- Visualizing
- Wondering or asking questions
- Things we like about the writing
Below is a “comic” slideshow with some of our reading thoughts from the books we have been reading.
(Click the button in the bottom right to view the slideshow in full screen.)
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Which of these reading thoughts do you use most in your reading?
Have you had a good reading thought in the book you’re reading now? What was it?
Have you read any of these books?
We have been learning how to add details and elaboration to our writing. Writing with specific details helps the reader visualize, so they can feel that they are right there in the story. If you use the right details you can paint a picture with words. For example:
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When we describe a setting or an object, it is good to add details for what the character can see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. That way the reader can feel like they are right there.
Describing Habitats
Since we are also learning about habitats in science, we decided to practice our descriptive writing by describing what it might feel like to be in these different habitats – coral reef, desert, rainforest, arctic tundra, and the African savanna.
Here are a few short examples of our descriptive writings about these habitats.
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Could you visualize our descriptions?
What details helped you visualize?
Which of these habitats would you like to visit?
Mr. Salsich’s class is back in action for another exciting year of learning and blogging together.
Our Fantastic Class
On our blog we will share lots of the amazing things we are learning together. Families, friends, and other students can follow along with our adventures and leave comments or ask us questions.
To learn how to leave a comment, click on the How To Comment tab on the top menu. We love hearing from other people!
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We will have pictures, articles, drawings, and videos of our learning on this blog. To stay up to date on what we are doing, you can subscribe to the blog using one of the methods on the left below the visitor’s map.
Teamwork!
We have only been back at school for a few weeks and are still getting to know each other. Please leave a comment to introduce yourself. You can answer one of the questions below, or just tell us a little bit about yourself.
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What fun things did you do over the summer?
What has been your favorite part of third grade so far?
What are you looking forward to this year?
Tomorrow is our last day of school before summer vacation!
We have had a great year together and have learned so many things. Luckily we have the blog to remember it all. You can always re-read posts, watch videos, or listen to voicethreads from the year by using the “tag cloud” or the archives on the sidebar.
Here is a slideshow with pictures from the first day of school right up until Field Day.
(The music is provided by our very own Alison, playing “Maple Leaf Rag” and the “Theme From Pink Panther”.)
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Thanks to all of our blogging buddies, commenters, and followers that have helped us learn and given us support and ideas!
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What is one of your favorite memories from the year?
Do you have a favorite post, video, or voicethread from the blog this year?
The other day we created our first Wordle. A wordle is a bunch of text that is arranged in different colors to make a design. The more times a word appears in the text, the bigger the word gets in a wordle.
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We decided to experiment with wordles by combining our names with the answers that we wrote to these questions:
What word would you use to describe our blog?
What word would you use to describe our classroom?
How would you describe the learning we do?
What is the most interesting thing in the classroom?
When we entered all the text into a wordle this is what we got!
Our class Wordle
(Click on the image to see it in full size.)
As you can see; awesome, fun, and smartboard were written down the most!
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What do you think of our wordle?
Are there any words in it that you have questions about?
What is the most interesting word you can find?
