Sunday, March 4, 2018

St. Patrick's Day for Third Graders

It's March and boy did it come roaring in like a lion! 
In fact, many schools in Virginia were closed this past Friday due to high winds, falling trees and power lines.
Things have calmed down since then and I'm so excited to see some signs of spring!
This month we are working on writing book summaries as a way to share books with each other. 
My kids LOVE their BAM  (Books And Me) Time.  This is the time of day when they can pick and choose their own books.  

To make them accountable for reading through their books, I will have them respond to their reading in different ways. 
We will be working on book reports this month in which they are required to summarize a fictional book using the 5 story elements. 


Teaching with Props: Summarize with a 5 Finger Glove

After lots of shared writing practice, most students are independently writing summaries and are using them to tell others about the books they read. 


We will create these little leprechauns to go along with our book sharing display.





I've bundled this book report frame with some other St. Pat's Day goodies. 



My students will add this leprechaun poem to their poetry anthologies. They will have fun using the clues in the poem to make their mind movies and draw their leprechaun. Then they will get practice using different reference books as they complete the follow up.

I've add a language arts "pit stop" that I give my students to check up on their writing and editing skills. The first part is an editing activity in which they have to correct mistakes involving punctuation, capitalization and spelling. They rewrite the sentences after "cleaning them up". Then they will write a few sentences to a prompt so I can gauge their sentence writing skills. Finally there are three questions related to word knowledge and grammar.


Check out the link below to grab this free St. Patrick's Day file!