Folktales, Fonts, and Hula Hoops.........

Happy Middle of the week!!!

Has anyone else had an amazingly crazy week?

Our Monday morning started with bus evacuation drills. 

Then rain..... next a downpour.  Fortunately my group got inside before this happened.... there were some other 3rd grade classes that were not so lucky.

You would have thought my little darlins' had never seen rain before.

After I FINALLY had them settled.... our room  shook ( literally).  A couple of students screamed and said,

" Do you think we need to go down to the basement? ".  Of course I said, " It's just a thunderstorm, Nothing to worry about."

A few minutes later the city's storm sirens were sounding, and to the basement we went. Nothing like spending some quality time with over 300 or more students in a basement.

All was well...... but the learning for the rest of the day was a bit more difficult to come by.

Later that day I found out that during all this chaos, a tree next to our end of the school building had been struck by lightning and had come crashing down to the ground.  ( maybe that was the reason for our room shaking?!)

The rest of the week has been much calmer. :)

I LOVE fonts.  My friend, Michele, of Run Miss Nelson's Got The Camera is having a font linky party.

I just had to join in the fun!  I recently discovered  wordmark.it from Michele's post. It's my newest obsession. Simply upload your fonts and type in a phrase and ... ta da.. it shows you how it would look. 

Go check out more fonts and join the linky party  by clicking on the picture below.

We've been working on Fairytale and Folktale unit.
Last week we read the story Lon, Po Po.  It's a story from our basal reader.
One of the activities that my students completed was a venn diagram comparing Lon, Po, Po to Little Red Riding Hood.
They watched the Youtube video of Little Red Riding Hood.

  Then I gave each student 3 sticky notes.  Each student had to come up with a way these two stories were similar and one way in which they were different.  Then each student had to place their sticky notes on our venn diagram.... ( a.k.a  hula hoops).

After we discussed everyone's ideas, each student got their very own venn diagram to complete about the 2 stories.  You can download this form from Google Docs by clicking the picture below.

This week we've been working on the story " Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ear".  Again, this is
a story from our basal reader.
One of the activities that my students participated in to help them understand the "lesson" that was taught  in this story was the telephone game.  My students sat in a large circle, and I began by whispering something in a student's ear.  Each student was to whisper what they heard into the next student's ear until it got back to me.  Of course, the sentence that was repeated at the very end was completely different from what we started with.  This led to a great discussion about misunderstandings and gossip which was the lesson taught in this story.
We are going to watch the YouTube video of "Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ear" later this week.

Another activity my students are going to complete is postcards from Africa.
I am going to show them pictures of Africa on our Promethean board using this website:
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/places/
This is fabulous for showing pictures of many different places around the world.
Students will then be given a blank index card to create their postcard from Africa.

We have several more stories to go in our Folktale/Fairytale unit. Next week we are going to read the story " Sidneyrella" and compare it to "Cinderella".  One of my favorite stories is " The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig" that we compare to the original version of the "3 Little Pigs".  I would love to hear about some of the activities and stories you use with your students on this topic!  I've been working hard to tie in the common core standards for literature with this unit.  It's been perfect for standards 3.RL.2, 3.RL.3, and 3.RL.9.

Thanks so much for stopping by!  Have a great rest of the week!!!  I am hoping to post a couple of Freebies on  election activities and a November calendar set on Friday or Saturday.