A 5 Day Week!!!!

I am really looking forward to our 5 day week. It will feel great to finally get through our routine each day and finish up some of our introductory units. We also have an amazing special guest joining us on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. George Steele is an amazing educator. He will teach our class about mammals. If you are free from 2-3 on Tuesday afternoon, please feel free to stop in and learn with us. Simply sign-in at the office and head up to the Tech Lab. For more information about Mr. Steele visit his website: http://georgesteele.webs.com/

Reading
   We will finish our first unit this week. We will learn about inferencing, explore the differences between fiction and non, fiction, and learn how to write a book letter. Each student will write a book letter during the week. This work will all be done in class! Students write to me about their independent books, and I will write back. Some weeks the content of these letters will be up to the student, while other weeks I will ask them to focus on our current lessons.

Writing
   We will continue gathering ideas for our personal narratives. We will also continue to write narratives from our lists. This week we will spend time learning about our "writer's voice". Our focus will be on writing like story tellers and making our narratives come alive.

Math
   We have two more lessons in our place value unit and then we will take our first test. We will learn how to order numbers and we will learn how to make an organized list to help us answer word problems. On Wednesday, the students will take their first unit test. This test will come home with a grade. It will need to be signed by a parent and returned to school next week. Specific dates will be attached to the graded test.
   On Thursday, we will begin our next unit on addition. This unit includes rounding, estimation, and adding with regrouping.

Social Studies
    We are almost done with our globes! We will add the continents this week and label the oceans. We will also complete our map study unit by working on a landform dictionary.

Science
   This week we will begin our first Science unit on Plant Growth and Development. We will begin by examining a bean seed and learning how to make scientific observations. I will also send home a seed chart for students to collect seeds of different sizes and colors. This is optional, not homework.

Although this is a 5 day week I will not be in school Tuesday morning or Wednesday. I am running a training session for some new teacher on Tuesday morning. I will be teaching them how to use Star Lab (one of my favorite units). On Wednesday I will attend a full-day district Science meeting. I will have access to my email both days!

A few photos from our week:

Thank you to our Mystery Reader this week, Mr. Morse.

Week of September 21st

We have another four day week ahead! On Monday we will paint our globes, so please do not send your child in their best clothes. 

Reading

     We will continue to build our strength as readers. I had the pleasure of having some one-on-one conversations with many students about the books they are reading. You may see some books come home with your child that I would like them to read for their 20 mins. nightly reading. These books should be returned to school the next day to be read in school. Thank you for your help with this! 

    This week we will learn how to choose a book on our reading level, how to preview a text, and how to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction.

Writing

    This week we will continue to gather topic ideas. We will make a list of important people in our lives and write off of this list. We will also read a book about memories and create a heart map of memories from our lives.

Math

     We are working on a place value unit. This week we will learn about number lines, and how to find missing numbers on a number line by determining the scale. We will also use place value to compare numbers. We will use "greater than", "less than", and "equal to" to compare the numbers.

Social Studies

     We will paint our globes on Monday! This week we will explore the parts of a map including:  a map grid, key, intermediate directions, and scale. We will also learn about Pangea and begin learning about different types of landforms and how continental drift contributed to the formation of various landforms.

Word Work

    Last week we explored nouns. This week we will extend our learning to include the difference between common and proper nouns. We will also begin working on some third grade vocabulary words. This week we will focus on the following words:

compare (from our math unit)

connection (from our reading unit)

scale (from our math and social studies units)

Any conversation you have at home about these words will help deepen our understanding. We will be working on them in school and this is not homework.

Seven Habits of Happy Kids

      This year we will use this wonderful book to help us grow as students. This month we will be concentrating on the first habit: Be Proactive. See the following link for more information on the book and the habits: http://www.theleaderinme.org/the-7-habits-for-kids 

     

Enjoy some highlights from last week!

We made our globes!

Thank you to our first Mystery Reader, Mrs. Stebbins!

Welcome Back to School

     Thank you for coming to Open House last week. As you look through the packet of information, please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have. I hope you enjoyed your child's first Friday Letter. Please keep in mind this is an unedited piece of writing meant to open the lines of communication between you and your child, as well as, give you an idea of what we worked on throughout the week.

     Last week we covered most of our classroom routines, so we will be able to use our class time this week to begin our learning in each subject area.

Reading Workshop
     Our first unit is called Living a Reading Life. The lessons in this unit are designed to help your third grader choose appropriate books, build their stamina during independent reading, increase fluency and comprehension, and develop a love of reading. This week we will begin with the basics. We will talk about what we are thinking while reading and we will begin to learn how to document our thinking using post-it notes. We will also chart how long we are able to read and make a goal to increase our stamina.

Writing Workshop
     Our first unit is a narrative unit. The students will learn how to construct a true story about their life. This week we will begin with a pre-assessment to give me an idea of what type of lessons to include throughout the unit. We will also begin collecting memories to drawn upon as story ideas. The students will be thinking about special people in their lives and making lists of moments shared with those people. We will also spend time writing about one of those moments.

Math
     Our first unit is a place value unit. This week we will learn four different ways to represent numbers (place value blocks, standard form, expanded form, and written form). We will practice using the forms to write numbers up to the hundred thousand place. We will also learn how to name the value of a digit and how to express numbers in different ways (ex: 1,000=10 hundreds). We will begin our work using place value blocks to help the students visualize the numbers. There will be math homework this week!

Social Studies
     Our first unit is a World Geography unit. We will begin this week with a review of the continents and oceans. We will label them on a map. We will also expand our knowledge of a compass to include the intermediate directions. On Thursday we will begin a messy project!

Word Work
     Due to this being a short week with a bus drill and an assembly we will not begin our vocabulary study this week. We will be working on learning how to spell some priority words and we will spend some time learning about nouns.

     As you can see we will be very busy this week! We will have our first Mystery Reader this Friday and you will have another Friday Letter to read. Please remind your child to bring their Friday Letter notebook, their completed writer's notebook cover, and their reading calendar to school tomorrow.