♪ Good morning to a brand new day ♪ ♪ Time to learn and games to play ♪ ♪ Learning things is so much fun ♪ ♪ Learning is good for everyone ♪ (upbeat guitar music) (playful music) (whistling music) - Good morning, third graders.

My name is Mrs. Nixon.

I am so excited to be here with you and support you as you become amazing thinkers, readers and writers.

This morning, I have been thinking about all of the exciting books.

I just finished off a series this last weekend and it was so fun, but I'm not going to lie, I'm a little heartbroken because I really wish there was another book to read in my mystery series.

Are you reading a really fantastic series too?

I would love to hear about it.

So, super easy.

If you want to write me a note, you can send it to the address that's popping up on the bottom of your screen.

Tell me about what book you've been reading, maybe it's a series of books, and I'm going to put one of these activity books in the mail addressed to you.

It's completely free.

So, here's another thing that is completely free is checking out books.

You can do that by visiting your local library checking out a book from your library at school.

Or, you can go online and check out a book using the app "Sora".

Speaking of "Sora", here in Fresno Unified, we love to celebrate our students that are checking out and using that app.

We go through and we look to see who is checking out the most books, and we have a countdown of the top five schools for the highest number of checkouts.

Are you ready to see who's in that fifth place?

All right, let's check it out.

It is Ewing Elementary.

Great job, Ewing!

Again, it's super easy to get on here.

All you need to do is check out a book using "Sora" and maybe tell a classmate or two.

I'd love to give your school a quick little shout out.

Okay, are we ready to start this morning?

Excellent.

So, this week we actually have two things that we're going to focus on.

We're going to look at vowel team syllables and then we're going to practice a whole bunch with Greek and Latin roots.

To help get us started, let's warm up those brains, that super smart muscle we've got.

We're going to look at our high frequency words and read those.

Remember, high frequency words are those words that you see often in your reading and you're going to use them often in your writing.

So, by third grade, it's really important that you're able to spell them.

These are all review from the year.

We're just going back, we're coming to the end of the year.

I want to make sure that we give us another opportunity to take a glance at them.

If there's something here that you see and you think, "Hm, I could practice spelling that."

Do it, write it down on a post-it note, practice it while you're brushing your teeth at night.

By the end of the week, you'll have it.

All right, let's go through, let's read them together.

You read them big and loud at home, I'll read them here, let's go.

"Green", "got", "has", "had", "have", "grow", "hold", "hot", "hurt" and "how".

Nicely done, third grade.

Today, let's look at our first two words.

We have green, G-R-E-E-N, and got, G-O-T. Help me use these in a couple of sentences.

Here's the first one.

"I hmm to visit my best friend last Saturday."

And the second one, "I love seeing all the hmm trees."

Okay, we've got green and got.

"I green to visit my best friend?"

That doesn't make any sense.

How about, "I got to visit my best friend last Saturday."

Nicely done.

And, "I love seeing all of the green trees" in the springtime, for sure, right?

Let's talk about a couple of things, I've got two themes that we're going to practice a lot today.

The first one, our vowel team syllables.

Now, we've talked about syllables.

We've talked about breaking down those multi-syllabic words.

It's going to help us to chunk our words into smaller parts that we're able to read.

This week, we're going to practice all with our vowel team syllables.

Just a couple of little reminders about things.

This one's a great one.

"Every syllable in a word has one vowel sound."

We want to remember that going forward, because, sometimes it can trick us up, because we'll think that every syllable has one vowel but we really want to focus on there's a vowel sound especially when we come to our vowel team.

Here's a reminder about our vowel teams.

"Vowel teams are two or more letters working together in a word to form one vowel sound."

These aren't all of them, but I put a whole bunch of vowel teams up here, because we know when we see A and I together, we can say "ai" and we can say "ay" for A-Y and we can say "ee" for E-A or we can say "ay" like in the word "bread".

Or "ed" like in "bread".

These are several, but not all of our vowel teams.

We're training our brains- I'm going to take us back here and do a little practice.

We're training our brains to see those vowel teams, so that we can divide our words into those syllables.

Let's look right here.

Here's the word "complain".

Do we see a vowel team?

Yes, right here, we've got A-I is our vowel team.

Now, remember how we divide our words into syllables?

We're always looking for our vowels.

I'm going to just mark it right here.

We've got a vowel right here, and our vowel team is going to count for our second one.

I also know that P-L is a consonant blend, it's going to stick together.

When I divide this, I know I've got two syllables, because I have two vowel sounds.

I know that I'm going to have- I'm going to divide it right there, because I've got my two vowel sounds "come", "plain".

All right, let's try it one more time.

Over here in this word, do I see my vowels?

Well, yes, I've got vowels, "oa", it's a vowel team.

I'm just going to mark it with one V and I've got another vowel team, let me underline them, I've got another vowel team right here.

So, just like we did in the past with our consonants we want to split those consonants.

We know we have two syllables and we've got "oat" and "meal", two syllables breaking and chunking apart those words.

Okay, let's go through.

I have one more thing that I want to talk about because, before we get to our practice, I want to do a little bit with some Greek and Latin roots.

We're going to practice several of them this week.

I'm going to just start with these four right now, so that we can start remembering what they are and figuring out what words mean by looking at them.

This is a great word study.

In third grade, you might have a notebook and maybe you jot them down.

Because as you come across more and more words that have these Greek and Latin roots in them, if you know these, it can help you to understand what some new words mean.

Let me show you what I mean.

You might put in your notebook, "Astro" or "Aster", can be spelled two different ways, but when you see this little cluster of letters, this root, you're going to know that it has something to do with a star or outer space.

When you see "photo", you're going to know that that means light.

Anytime we see "graph", we're going to think "something written".

And then, "tele" simply means far.

Here are some Greek and Latin roots.

Let's see if we can match our words to some definitions.

I have this one here, "A picture made by a camera capturing light."

Hmm, okay.

I've got "geographer" or "photograph".

Now, this one was kind of an easy one today, because I know you know this word already, but let's look at our parts.

We have "photo", which means "light", and "graph" which means "something written".

What is a photograph?

Well, it's a picture made by a camera capturing light.

Good.

Our second one, we already know is going to be a "geographer", which is simply the study of Earth's surface.

They're going to make a map of what the Earth's surface looks like.

Let's do just a quick little bit of practice with some of these.

If your teacher were to ask you to practice some of them, this might be what they're going to ask you to do.

You're going to remember that our vowel team syllables have one vowel sound.

In here, it says, "Read each sentence, underline the word with a vowel team syllable, and then circle that vowel team syllable."

Let me switch out my pens.

Let's do a bright colored one.

Okay, let's read this out loud, big and loud.

Here we go.

"He explained how to get to the lake from his home."

Do you see a word that has a vowel team syllable?

Right here, I see that A-I, right?

Okay, here is our word that has that vowel team syllable.

I underlined it, maybe I should circle it, 'cause I wasn't following directions.

Let's try it again.

"She is reading the novel that you gave me."

Do you see a vowel team?

Yeah, right here.

Here's our word, and then, we're going to circle our vowel team.

Just like that, excellent.

Let's do one more.

"He repeats the sentence so we can write it correctly."

Do you see any of those vowel teams?

Yep, right here, and I see it right there.

Training our brains to recognize those.

Excellent.

Let's skip down here and look at some of those Greek and Latin roots.

Again, we have them just written here, "astro", "graph", "photo" and "tele".

You might have those in your notebook, so that you can practice them this week.

Right now, what I want us to do, we're going to read the sentence and underline that root word or the word with the root, "astro", "graph", "photo" or "tele".

We're just identifying it.

Okay, let's go through and see what we can find.

"The astronaut told us about his space mission."

Do you see one with that root?

Yeah, right here.

"I checked out a biography on Thomas Edison at the library."

Yes, "biography" has "graph" in it.

Excellent job.

All right, I want to finish out today.

I just have one quick little thing, because, as we are looking and thinking about Greek and Latin roots, there are some little small pieces we're going to come across.

Here is one today.

We're just going to look at this one.

"Fin" means end.

When we look at a sentence like this and it says, "Our final exams start in about two weeks."

We know that "final" because it has that "fin" in there.

We know that "final" is not referring to "first", "grand or amazing".

It's actually referring to "last".

By knowing what that means, we can go through and figure out what that word means.

We can use our context clues.

We can use knowing our Greek and Latin roots, all of those different things.

Third grade, it was fantastic getting to hang out with you this morning, as you're getting ready for school.

Remember, you are responsible for your learning success.

So, listen, ask questions and share your ideas, because together, we can do so much more.

I can't wait to see you back here tomorrow on PBS.

I've got some new words to show you.

We're going to practice all of those Greek and Latin letters and sounds and roots.

Can't wait to see you then.

Take care, be safe, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Bye bye.

(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Good morning to a brand new day ♪ ♪ Time to learn and games to play ♪ ♪ Learning things is so much fun ♪ ♪ Learning is good for everyone ♪ (upbeat guitar music)