How to Use Quotation Marks

As we move through the grade three writing program, it's important to not only teach students the importance of engaging their reader and organizing their ideas effectively, they also need to know the more technical aspects of what good writers do. Using quotation marks is a bit like making bread: one missed step and you end up with a bit of a gooey mess. 

For this reason, I like to teach children that there are five key steps (or ingredients!) to correct quotation mark usage. 

We read a variety of stories on the Smartboard as part of Morning Message that rely heavily on characters speaking in order for the plot to move along, so the boys and girls are familiar with how they work. Our focus for this month has been on reading orally so that we sound like the characters, so naturally, that meant we needed lots and lots of dialogue in the story.   

Over the course of the last week or so, the boys and girls have learned all about how to show when a character is speaking in their own writing. This was introduced when students started working on the page below from their Pancake Tuesday booklet. Here they're asked to finish the story and they were encouraged to use quotation marks where possible. 

On Thursday night, the boys and girls will need to practice those skills again on their homework page (pictured below). 

The graphic below was used as part of a blog post a few years ago. Students can use this as a reference guide when checking their own work at home tonight to make sure they're work is completed correctly. 

Morning Meeting

We always begin our day with Morning Message, but in the last two weeks, we started adding something new: morning meeting.  

After agendas are copied and all the housekeeping items are taken care of, we gather in a circle on the big red carpet and begin our day in a new way.  We shake hands with the person next to us and give them a hearty "Good morning"! Then, we talk, learn, laugh, sing, you name it!  

So far, our meetings tend to follow this routine: 

• shake the hand of the child next to you
• check in about how we are feeling 
• talk about the learning goals for the day 
• learn something new (today it was how to solve the scale problems that'll be on EQAO)  
• have some fun (this week, it's been learning about how to improvise in drama and how we never deny what the other participant says)  
• we sing a song or two 
• we read a story (this week, we read "The Bad Seed" and talked about how it's never to late to change your ways (perfect for report card week, dontcha think?) 
  

After all this (about 20 minutes or so), we head back to our seats for Morning Message.  I've shortened that up quite a big and I'm okay with that.  

I've noticed changes in the 10 or so school days we've done Morning Meeting.  We all seem more connected. Everyone is more alert and engaged. I'm learning more about my students because I've designated time in the day that is specifically for relationship building.  

There's no question about it, and the kids agree, Morning Meeting is here to stay! 

Happy Everything Day!

On Tuesday, we celebrated both Valentine's day AND the 100th day of school! We had so much fun!  

We exchanged cards and treats in the morning, shared the story behind our 100th day of school shirts (it's the last year Mrs. M is doing this, so that made it extra special!) and searched like mad for 100 hearts hidden in the classroom. Could we find all 100 in 100 seconds? Sadly, we could not, but that's okay, we'll try again another time!  We'll fine tune our detective skills and perhaps even work on some sprints down in the gym! LOL!  

In the afternoon, we switched gears and celebrated all things related to the 100th day of school. Instead of "Minute to win-it" games, we changed the rule to 100 seconds and boy, the tension was high and the laughs were loud!  

Thank you all the parents and families for your support of our 100th day of school t-shirt project. I know it was a lot of extra work.  If you were a fly on the wall this morning, you would have been so proud of your chickadee as they shared all the time and love that went into making the shirts.  I'm so grateful to have such a supportive group behind the children in my class.  

What's F.A.C.E?

You may recall we spent the first 20 or so days talking about the habits of good readers. 

February/March is a good time of year to revisit the basics and make sure we're all on track.  "FACE" really helps students understand what we mean when we talk about "What good readers do/look like".

We'll talk about what "FACE" means this week as part of morning message and we'll continue this discussion into next week as well.  

Fluency means our reading sounds smooth, kind of like the way people talk. 

Accuracy means we can read all the words correctly. 

Comprehension means we understand what we read.

Expand my vocabulary means we use the words from our reading in our day-to-day conversations and writing. 

For fun over the next few weeks, we're going to read pretend announcements as part of our Morning Message in order to practice FACE. 

Put a little love in your heart!

Recently, we've been talking and reading about vulnerable members of our community and how we can support them.  After talking about the meaning of the word "vulnerable person", we put our heads together and brainstormed.  We came up with quite a list.  

After that, students began a writing piece about which vulnerable group they were especially passionate about and how they could support them better.  The results were very touching.  

Students are either finished or near-finished their paragraphs and they're wonderful.  I am so proud of my class. I think this is their finest work yet.  They were charged with not only writing a paragraph with key content information, but they also had to implement feedback from earlier tasks and pay attention to conventions.  This is a "complete package", if you will. I'm going to display their work in our room for a week or two and then I'll send it home to be shared with families.