Welcome to Room 12! I'm Ann Felton, and this is my seventeenth year teaching and my eleventh in third grade here in Lubbock. I made this page in September so parents could see our spelling lists, homework and class news from home or work, and so grandparents far away could see what we're doing. To protect our students' privacy, you won't find any names or pictures of children here.

Our page: Spelling · Class News · Pebbles · Butterflies · Field Trip · Reading Challenge · For Parents · Guestbook

Our last list of the year (test was Friday, May 22): Summer Words

Thirty-one lists this year, and every one of them is in your child's spelling notebook. Over the summer, have them pick five words a week from a book they're reading and spell them for you at supper.

September. Twenty-two third graders and one teacher started the year together. We wrote our class rules as a group and everybody signed them. Pebbles moved in (see below). Thank you to all the grandparents who came to our Grandparents Day breakfast.

October. For Fire Prevention Week the fire department brought a truck to school, and every child knows to stop, drop and roll and to have a meeting place outside the house. Ask your child where yours is! We measured, weighed and counted the seeds in three pumpkins. The biggest one had 512 seeds.

November. Our Book Fair was a big success, and our class earned eleven new books for the classroom library. We made a Thankful Tree for the hall, with a paper leaf from every child.

December. Our class sang two songs in the winter program. We wrote letters to the residents of a nursing home and delivered them with paper snowflakes.

January. We celebrated the 100th Day of School with collections of 100 things. We saw 100 pennies, 100 buttons, 100 macaroni and one very brave collection of 100 pinto beans glued to a poster. We started multiplication!

February. Valentine's Day party (thank you, room parents). We had three indoor recesses for blowing dust this month. Welcome to spring on the South Plains.

March. We learned about Texas Independence Day on March 2, and we made a class timeline of Texas history. After spring break our caterpillars arrived (see Butterflies).

April. Everybody worked so hard getting ready for the TAAS tests in reading and math, and I am proud of every one of you. Field trip to the county museum (see below)!

May. We let our butterflies go. Field Day was hot and wonderful, and the third grade won the tug-of-war against the teachers. We had our reading challenge party, and on our last afternoon we wrote letters to next year's third graders telling them what to expect. (Most of them said "multiplication" and "Pebbles.")

Pebbles is a golden hamster. She came to Room 12 in September and has been our most popular classmate ever since. The class learned to give her fresh water every day, to clean her cage on Fridays, and to let her sleep, because hamsters are nocturnal. That means they're awake at night and sleep during the day, which is why she always seemed to wake up right at 3:00.

Pebbles went home with a different family most weekends (with a signed permission form). In November she escaped from her cage and was found the next morning asleep in the reading corner, in a book bin. She has always loved books.

Pebbles is spending the summer at my house. She sends her love.

This spring we watched painted lady butterflies go through their whole life cycle right in our classroom. Here's what we saw:

1. Caterpillars (larvae). They arrived in clear cups with their food already inside, tiny and fuzzy. Every day we measured and drew them in our science journals. They ate and ate and grew and grew, and they shed their skins as they got bigger.
2. Chrysalis (pupa). After about ten days, they climbed to the tops of their cups and hung upside down in the shape of a J. Then they shed their skin one last time and became chrysalises. We carefully moved them into our butterfly house.
3. Butterflies (adults). About a week and a half later, the butterflies came out! Their wings were crumpled at first and they had to pump them out and let them dry. They left little red drops behind. That is NOT blood. It's leftover from changing inside the chrysalis, and it's perfectly normal.
4. Release. We fed them sugar water and orange slices for a few days, and then on a warm, still morning in May we let them go in the schoolyard.

Egg, larva, pupa, adult. Ask your child to tell you the four stages. I promise they know.

On Thursday, April 23, we rode the bus to the county museum. We saw arrowheads and stone tools, a mammoth tooth found right here on the South Plains, a real covered wagon, and a windmill bigger than our classroom. The best part was the old one-room schoolhouse, where we sat at wooden desks and wrote on slates, and found out that third graders a hundred years ago had to bring wood for the stove. Nobody complained about our classroom after that.

Thank you to our parent chaperones, who were wonderful, and to the bus driver, who was patient.

Our class goal for the year was 50,000 minutes of reading at home, counted from our signed reading logs. We beat it!

That's more than 914 hours of reading! As promised, we had a pizza party, and I read the last chapter of our class read-aloud wearing my pajamas and bunny slippers. A promise is a promise.

• Read every night. Twenty minutes, and sign the reading log. Read to them, let them read to you, or both. It is the single best thing you can do.
• Multiplication facts. By the end of third grade, children should know their facts through the 10s. Flash cards in the car, quizzing at the supper table, skip-counting out loud (3, 6, 9, 12...) all help. A little every day works better than a lot on Sunday night.
• Spelling. Some ideas that work in our room: rainbow writing (write each word three times in three colors), writing words in shaving cream on the kitchen table, or having your child spell to you while you cook.
• Cursive. We learned all the lowercase and capital letters this year. Have them practice by writing a letter to a grandparent this summer. Two jobs done at once.
• Wednesday folders. Graded papers came home every Wednesday. Please keep looking at them next year, too; it's the easiest way to know how things are going.
• Questions? Send me an e-mail at [email protected] or leave a message with the school office.