11 Must Have Chapter Book Series in YOUR 3rd Grade Classroom

One of the best things about being a teacher is being able to stock your classroom up with great books for kids to read. In the early days of my career, I spent the weekends hunting down good deals to grow my class library. When I left my classroom, I easily had over 1,000 books in my class library! You can check this post out for ideas on how to grow your class library on a teacher budget!
Today I'll be sharing 11 Chapter Book Series that will surely be a hit in your 3rd Grade Classroom Library! **This post contains affiliate links

I Survived Series

Who Was and What is Series

The Boxcar Children 

Goosebumps

Rainbow Magic Series

Junie B. Jones

A-Z Mysteries

Magic Tree House Series

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Dork Diaries

Who Would Win Series

If you're also interested in a list of Popular 3rd Grade Read Aloud Books, you can get that here! 
 Aloha,

Five for Friday

I can't believe that my summer vacation is halfway through!! It's been really nice to be off of work but to tell the truth, I feel busier than ever!! I still feel like I don't have enough time in the day. I've been having class for the past two weeks (I take PD courses to try to get a tiny increase in pay). 

Other than that I've been try to stay busy and be productive. Linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to show you a peek at what I've been up to over the past week!


The boy and I headed out to the North Shore this week to hit  up some fishing spots. Of course, we had to stop by the famous shrimp trucks!! This is the garlic shrimp plate I had for lunch the other day. It was SO GOOD, I practically scarfed that entire plate down!!

Like I said earlier, we've been trying to find some time to make it to the beach since I am so casper white, lol. Sadly, during the school year I never find time to make it out much and turn very very pale. We've going to the beach and fishing lately...Here's my set up. I just reel the line in if the little bell rings, which of course means that I hooked a fish.  The boy likes walking around and casting his line out...so that's him with his pole in the background (even though you can't even see a pole). 

I've also been working very hard to organize all of our files. We used to just throw all of our files into this bin. It took me HOURS to organize this. Each of the files are color coordinated based on type of files. The papers inside are all hole punched and neatly fastened to the file folder (kind of like the files at a doctor or dentist office).  I got the inspiration because when I was at the vet, I liked how neat all their folders looked :) 

I've also been working on updating my plan book for this upcoming school year. I currently have one listed on TPT that I used last year but I wanted to add some things in it. This one I'm working on has a lot of color, to match my theme this year (bright colors). 

I'm debating if I should add this to my old plan book file (which is mostly black and white) or upload this as an entirely different product. 

Suggestions on this??

And last but not least, I've been using my time wisely at the beach. While my pole is waiting for bites, I'm working on reading this book by Stephanie Harvey. Reading has never been my area of strength to teach. The past few summers I've been working on reading lots of pd books to hopefully strengthen my craft. I'm looking forward to implementing all of the awesome strategies I've been reading about. 

I'm currently working on creating a Grade 2 Math Pre Assessment. I have one up in my TPT store for Grade 3, which contains all of the 2nd grade CCSS. I use this in my classroom to find out where my students are at when they come in to me. I'm looking for somebody to look through this file for me..someone familiar with grade 1 standards (or someone in 2nd grade that knows what students should come up knowing), editing, format, vocabulary being used... I haven't worked with kids that young in awhile so I'll need to make sure that I'm using proper vocabulary. This was a TPT request I had. If anyone is interested in reviewing this file for me, leave me a message in the comment section with your email. I'll email the file to you for free! I'm looking for 2-3 people to view this for me. 

Thank you!!

PS: It seems that everyone is making a switch over to bloglovin. I'm not too sure if I will lose all my followers if I don't make the switch...BUT just in case, make sure to follow me on Bloglovin...please.

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Publishing Party and Medals

Thank goodness it's the weekend and yay for a productive Saturday. It sure has been awhile since I've had one of those. Today I've been busy at work prepping some stuff for something exciting happening in school next week. Some of you may remember, awhile back I was talking about how my students were busy at work writing stories that had a twist to classic Fairy Tales. Well..those stories have finally been completed, shipped out for publishing, and shipped back to our school. 

Excuse this photo. I had to pull this of of my instagram since my copy of our book is at school :/ 

My students are officially published authors...and to celebrate such a wonderful accomplishment..we are having a Publishing Party this Wednesday in our school cafeteria. This is an event that was open to all third grade parents. Students will be displaying their books and they will be given the opportunity to answer any questions about the process or their inspiration. They will also be given the chance to share their books aloud to others in the author chair.  They are SO EXCITED and I am so proud of them because they each did such a wonderful job and worked so very hard. 

SO...I decided to award each of them with a IM A PUBLISHED AUTHOR medal...

Not sure if anyone else has a use for these but if you're interested let me know in the comment section below and I could send you an editable version on ppt. 

AND...I just have to mention that the cover to our book was drawn by my very talented friend. Some of you may remember her as the person who re-created my Angry Birds Cause and Effect Anchor Chart. 

Isn't she so talented?? When my mom saw our class book, she thought I had used clipart to create it. 

I've been trying to convince her to create clipart because she's talented and I think she would do great. For those of you out there who do create clipart...is it difficult? Perhaps she could start this up for a summer project?! haha. 

In celebration of all the wonderful mom's out there...here is what we created for our Mother's Day Gifts. It's just a cute little bear holding a bundle of flowers. On the stem of each flower is a coupon that moms can redeem from their child. My kids also created their own coupon. Many of the wrote things like "I will complete my homework without being told" or "I will complete my homework with no complaints". lol. I had to laugh at that one. 

How precious is this little bear?? 

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms. I really give you all credit. I don't know how you all continue to be such wonderful teachers, diligent bloggers, and excellent mothers. I hope to one day be like you :)

Fairy Tale Fun

In the past three weeks, my students and I have been very busy reading fairy tales. The students have been excited in finding books that have twists or different perspectives to the classic fairy tale stories we have become familiar with. We've been spending a lot of time using double bubble maps to compare and contrast the characters, setting, and plots of the stories. 

This sparked a lot of excitement with the kids, so I decided to go with it and this year, our class will be publishing FairyTale books with Student Treasures. 

For those of you who have never heard of student treasures, it's a wonderful and very FREE publishing site. You can publish a class book and it will be a hard bound book, your class also gets a free copy. This is actually my first year working with the company, but so far I've heard tons of great things about this company from those who have published in the past. 

I've been introducing the writing process to my students and created this poster, ocean themed, of course so that I can see where the students are at in their various stages of writing. 

They are so very excited and I have some wonderful stories in progress. Can't wait to share the finished product with everyone. 

Here are some of the books we have been reading:

This is a cute book, the Hawaii Gingerbread Man. I've linked this book to amazon if you're interested in checking it out :)

This is another cute book..found this from a parent who did Mystery reader for us :)

This book has been SUCH a huge hit! The kids think this one is hilarious!!

All of these books have served to be great examples for some inspiration as to how my students can change a story, but still have a similar story line...Until next time!!