Full Weekly Update

   Thank you for coming in today to celebrate our writing. If you were unable to make it I will send home the writing this week for you to celebrate at home. Also, we will have many more third grade events this year that you can take part in.

Reader's Workshop
     We have begun a new unit on nonfiction. We began looking at the text features found in nonfiction and how they can help deepen our understanding of an article or book. We will also look at the different formats nonfiction authors use.

Writer's Workshop
    Today your child brought home our completed paragraph unit. The paragraphs attached to the packet were completed together. I hope that you see an improvement in your child's writing with the personal narrative and our Friday Letters. It is now my expectation that all students will use proper capitalization and punctuation when required to write complete sentences.
    We have completed our personal narrative unit and the students will write an on-demand narrative for me to use as an assessment for the unit. Then we will move to our next unit, informational writing.

Math
    We have completed our first of three multiplication units. This unit was designed to help the students understand the concepts behind multiplication and when/why we multiply. We learned how repeated addition relates to multiplication, how to use arrays and how to quickly find equal group amounts. We also learned that the commutative property applies to multiplication. We will be taking a test on this unit tomorrow.
     We will begin the next unit Wednesday. This is where we will begin to learn our facts. We will start with 2x, 5x, 0x, 1x, 9x, and 10x. As I introduce these I will be posting our strategies to finding answers on the blog to help with homework. It is important for the students to practice their facts at home each night! Flash cards are an easy and quick way to practice facts. There are also a number of websites and apps to help students study facts.

Social Studies
      As a cross-over with reading, we will be learning about Ancient China and modern day China. We will use nonfiction texts to compare and contrast China, then and now.

Stay tuned for some photos from the past few weeks!