Queen Frog is Kidnapped by the Evil Chicken

Yes, this is the premise of this year's play.  Queen Frog is in charge of all the books and with her kidnapping, the stories get all mixed up.  Will they get fixed?  Come to our year end play to find out!  Thanks for Darby Puglieli for volunteering a huge chunk of time to work with our playwright group.  The whole class brainstormed ideas, we narrowed it down to our two favorites and the writing group is finding a way to combine both ideas into one class play.

The esteemed playwright group

The students not involved in the writing group will be managing and creating other important parts for our play.  We have a Props group, a Set Design Group and a Costume group. Students self-selected the groups they wanted to be a part of.

Property (Props) group

Set Design

Costumes

A Race With Time
So with only 6 weeks left of school we are in a race with time to get everything covered before June 12!  Here is a quick glimpse into our current units of study.

Science
Students have been exploring pitch as it relates to the size of the instrument.  They are determining that smaller instruments have a higher pitch (and the vibrations are faster) and bigger instruments can make lower pitches (and lower pitches have slower vibrations.)  We also learned that you can adjust the pitch of an instrument by adjusting the tension of the string.

Kalimba

Water Phone

Xylophone

Play Writing and Fractured Fairy Tales
All students were involved in writing plays even if they were not in the playwright group.  Student groups wrote one-act plays that were then performed by another group of actors.  The writers had to be careful to make their play clear, contain dialogue that told the story and include stage directions for the actors.  We had a lot of fun with this mini-unit and the actors had fun interpreting the words of their peers.

We are working on a fun writing project this week, writing a fractured fairytale.  Students read the book The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.

This is a story told from the point of view of the Wolf.  He claims that the original story is a fallacy and that he was framed in order to make the account of what happened with the pigs more interesting to the public.  If you have not read this book, you should.  It is quite clever and a great way to discuss points of view.  The students' task will be to take a well known fairytale (like Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Billy Goats Gruff or Goldilocks and the Three Bears) and tell it from a different character's point of view.  The room was a buzz this morning with ideas and clever twists to the original stories.

Reading
We are flying through books in our reading groups and I anticipate that each group will get through at least one more book prior to year end.  Students have recently read a variety of literature including: The Westing Game, The Fairy-Tale Detectives, Holes, the Chalk Box Kid and a biography about Dr. Seuss.  Students continue to work on comprehension strategies and vocabulary work.

Research
We are all excited about the animal research we are conducting.  Students are enjoying learning about their animals and I am looking forward to seeing their final projects.

Math
We continue exploring 3-D shapes.  Students built various Polyhedrons using plastic pieces called polydrons.  Once the shapes were made, we created "nets" of the various shapes.  A net is basically a 2D pattern for a 3D shape.  The nets include all faces for the polyhedra.

Creating with Polydrons

Prism and Pyramids

FIELD TRIPS
This the Field Trip Season.  Here is a list of our upcoming trips.

• On Thursday, May 3 we are heading to Olbrich Gardens for a plant program.  This ties into the 3rd grade science standards for plants and animals.
• On Friday, May 11 we are heading out for our Urban Adventure. This is an all day experience.
• On Friday, June 1 we will take our annual trek to the zoo with lunch in my backyard!  This is where students experience the WORLD'S BIGGEST SUNDAE!
• Friday, June 8th, all grades have a field day.  Third grade goes over to Yahara Place Park.
• Looking to schedule: We are hoping to schedule a work time at Tenney Park sometime in May.  This is a trip Mr. Swift's class and I did together.  I hope to have this scheduled soon.

Flyers and Special Events happening around town