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In: Language Arts, Third grade

One thing I love about third grade is that it’s the year we start a more focused study of English grammar. Up until now, it’s all been rather subconscious. We’ve written nouns in blue and verbs in red and modeled the importance of beginning sentences with capital letters and ending with punctuation, but we haven’t been explicit up until this point.

We started the year with the Creation story. Adam naming the animals was the perfect place to begin with nouns. And the wild beasts gave us a good place to begin with verbs. From there, we used describing words, adverbs and adjectives.  Read more...

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In: Language Arts

From the archives

Peter Piper, Betty Botter, Sally and her sea shells- tongue twisters
are just as fun to say as they are difficult! They are helpful in
speech therapy, for people who are trying to get rid of an accent, and
for children who are just getting to know the letters and their
sounds.
Here are some of my favorites:

Six sick slick slim sycamore saplings.

Toy boat. Toy boat. Toy boat.

She sells sea shells by the sea shore.
The shells she sells are surely seashells.
So if she sells shells on the seashore,
I’m sure she sells seashore shells.  Read more...

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In: Language Arts, Reading and Literature

We went driving up and down our town’s Mulberry Street today to see what we could find. Unfortunately there were no marching bands or elephants! Before we went, we tried writing our own tall tales.

As I was out walking I saw a big blue ball. But it couldn’t be a big blue ball. It was a round blue whale. And to think that I saw it on Eldred Street!

 Read more...