Mrs. Thorp’s Third Grade Blog

Bird watching is not just for senior citizens!  Children can have lots of fun during the summer watching birds right in their own backyard.  Here are a few websites that can get you started.

• Bird Sleuth gives you a great start by providing with a project guide to download.  It is excellent.  Try it!
• This Bird Search Guide is also wonderful.  It will help you identify the birds that come to your backyard and help you identify the different sounds of each bird.  Very cool!
• Wild Birds Unlimited is another great resource for you.  If you have a Wild Birds Unlimited store near you, take a trip to visit it.  You and your child will enjoy it.
• Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website has a web cam of different birds.  You can see birds building nests, feeding their young and baby birds hatching.

If you and your child enjoy wild life and being outdoors, this is a great summer time learning experience.

Let me know what you think.

Teaching your child how to tell time just takes practice, everyday practical experience works best.

Having a clock that your child can move the hour and minutes hands is a great way to do it.  Here are some possiblites:

• Go to a garage sale or flea market and buy an old analog clock. It does not even have to run.
• Go to a teacher store and buy a toy clock.
• Make a clock out of a paper plate and a brad to fasten the minute and hour hands to the clock.
• Check this web site out which has a clock with movable hands.

As with any learning, patience is key.  Your child will learn at his/her own pace.  Have fun with it.

Sometimes we have to explore all the reading  possiblities for our children, including reading stories on the computer.

Here is a web site, Johnny’ s Story Page,  that will give your child reading practice at whatever his/her reading level is.

It may not be for every child, but if you have a reluctant reader, give this site a try.

Let me know if you like it or if it works with your child.

School is almost out for many schools and summer vacation will begin.

Many conscientious  parents wlll ask, “How can I help my child over the summer?”   A great question.

One of the best ways is to have your child read, but reading can be more than just sitting a reading a book.

Try some of these ideas with your child:

1. Read and carry out a kid-friendly recipe.
2. Read the comic section of the newspaper.
3. Have your child write out the shopping list for the week and then when you go the store, your child can read off the items that need to be purchased.
4. Play board games where reading is involved, like Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue and Life.
5. Make your games.  Here is a wonderful web stie that lists some games that you and your child can make and play together.

Let me know if you have other ideas that work with your child.  Then I can share them with others so that they can benefit from them.

The outside is one of the best classrooms for children.  The outdoors is a natural place for children to learn.  It fits them well:  no desks to sit in, lots of fresh air, lots of movement and things to see and hear and smell and touch.

But where do you start?  Where do you go?

I came across a great website on helping your child learn about nature. Check it out.  It has resources to download like a nature scavenger hunt list,  bookmarks and book plates.  It gives fun recipes and books to use.  It will even give a list of parks in your geographic area by plugging in your zip code.

These are some of pictures of birds that my husband and I saw at  Sleepy Hollow State Park here in Michigan this past spring.

State and County Parks are great places to go to help your young learners enjoy nature at its best.

We heard much of the increase of obesity in chldren in America.

Does your child get enough exercise?

How much recess time does your child get at school?

I have been in schools where children get three recesses a day and in some where they only get one 15 minute recess at noon.

Parents, is this something you should check out at your child’s school?  Could the amount of recess affect your child’s ability to work productively  the rest of the day?

Let me know what your experience with recess has been.

Music does so much for our lives.  It can relax us or energize us.  But it also can be a tool that teaches us.

I always enjoyed teaching with music.  For children who are auditory learners songs are a great way to learn subject matter that may be hard to learn in other ways.

Here is an excellent website that offers songs that teach just about everything, from math to science to history. It is called Furiously Curious.  You can download the songs to i-tunes one at a time or buy the cd.

I highly recommend it!

Here is a fun way to learn or review the capitals of each state in the United States.  It is the game of Sequence.

Many of you may have seen or played the game Sequence (it is one of our family’s favorites).  Now there is a version called States and Capitals Sequence.

In this game you have to match a card with the capital to the state on the playing board.  The first to make a sequence of five in a row is the winner.

I bought it at Target, but I am sure other stores that carry toys will have it also.

Let me know what you think.

D.E.A.R. is a well-known phrase in many classrooms today.  It is a time when students and teachers stop what they are doing and read just for fun.  The students get to choose what they want to read.  What a great idea!

Parents can do the same thing at home.  In fact I recently read an article where a family does just that.  Everyone in the house spends 20 minutes  a day reading. No radio, no T.V., just quiet reading time.

Let me know what you think.

What do you do when your child is reading to you and he/she does not know a word?  The easiest thing to do is to tell your child the word, but that is not the best thing to do in most cases.

Here are some ideas that you can use when your child does not know a word:

• Have your child look at the pictures (if there are any)  on the page for clues.
• Tell your child to keep reading the rest of the sentence to see if something in the sentence gives a clue to the unknown word.
• Have your child look at the unknown word to see if it looks like another word that he already knows.  For example, if your child does not know the word “few”  but does know the word “new”, he can use what he does know to figure out what he does not know.
• Show your child how to find little words inside bigger words, for example, “independent” has “in” and “pen” inside of it.

What do you do when your child reads a word incorrectly?

1. Ask your child if that word makes sense in that sentence.
2. Ask your child if it looks right.
3. Ask your child of it sounds right.
4. Have your child look at the whole word.  Sometimes children only look at the first part of a word and guess at the rest.  Therefore, they will read “play” when the word is “playful”, or “someone”  for “something”.

I hope that these ideas help.  Let me know if you have any other ideas.