Be An UPstander And Don't Spread Rumors!

Howdy folks!

We started this in grand day off with a Cornerstone lesson from a couple of E-8 parents! We listened to a book being read aloud, Mr. Peabody's Apples, which is a story about a respected role model in a small town whose reputation is damaged by rumors being spread amongst the community. This story encapsulates the notion that words can, indeed, hurt others, and to avoid hurting other people, we must learn the whole the whole truth, and we must be careful about what we say and how we say it.

After the story we discussed and practiced this adage: "Rumors stop with me."

• Refuse to listen when friends are gossiping
• Don't repeat rumors or gossip to others
• Question the validity of the rumor
• Say something positive about the target of the rumor. Be an UPstander and fill buckets!

We then segued into a math assessment on time, specifically, reading and converting analog time into digital time, finding the start time or the end time of activity, and finding the elapsed time of an activity. I explained to the students that this assessment is simply just to see where they are at in their understanding of telling time, and that they should not be too stressed out it!

During Writer's Workshop today, we continued our whole-class research project on hermit crabs! As you might know, E-8 plans on having a few hermit crab class pets in the near future, and to learn how to care for these creatures, we planned on  researching hermit crabs in the wild, and hermit crabs in captivity! Yesterday, we brainstormed some questions that we had about hermit crabs, and some of these questions turned into subtopics! Today we discussed appropriate resource materials, read and analyzed some of the information in these resources (to determine which pieces of information can be used for today's subtopic), and utilized the 3-keyword strategy to take down notes! The 3-keyword strategy, along with the sketch and label strategy, prevents plagiarism and pushes students to take notes in their own words! Here are the steps:

1.  Read the paragraph for a good understanding
2. Close-read the paragraph to choose three key words that will help you explain and summarize the info in your own words.
3. Close the book and utilize the three key words to write down the information that you've just read in your own words!

Their are many components to a research report that require many skills and strategies; since this is the first time that students have done any research in my class, the cognitive load was on my shoulders,  and I did a lot of think-alouds as I was modeling the reading of the resources and utilizing the 3-key what strategy to take notes! I will gradually release the responsibility onto the students when I feel that they can use these strategies on their own for research purposes! I hope that these research skills and strategies will transcend beyond third grade and have use in the upper grades and beyond! Booyah!

The first paragraph was useful for our topic so we turned the paragraph into notes!
I explained to the students that the second paragraph was about fiddler crabs, so
the info there could not be used for our topic of the hermit crab!

Making sure we cite those sources!

And those are the main points for this fabulous Wednesday! Cheers y'all and have a nice evening!