10/20/2017 Room 303 News

Weekly Updates and Reminders:

• Daily folders and red reading folders are to go to and from school each day.  Reading logs are to be filled out at home to log their 20 minutes of nightly reading.
• Assignment Notebooks (planners) are to be signed or initialed every evening by a parent.  Thank you for taking the time to check your child's planner.
• Math homework is checked in class together each day.  This time is spent reteaching (if necessary) and more importantly, a time for students to take ownership of their learning by asking questions if they have an incorrect answer on their homework.
• Please always email BOTH teachers if you have any questions or concerns.
• We have started WARM fuzzies in 3rd grade!  Warm fuzzies are a way for us to celebrate our classroom family by acknowledging leadership skills, positive behaviors, and working together collaboratively.  Students have an opportunity on Fridays to shop at our classroom store using their fuzzies.   
  
  
  
  

Math:

This week students were introduced to multi step number stories.  As part of their learning, I incorporated a fun Halloween art project and students wrote Halloween number stories that included multi step problem solving using two different operations.

 Also, with regard to the weekly fluency quizzes, all students will move onto multiplication in November.  So if your child is currently on addition and subtraction, please begin practicing multiplication as well.  

Social Studies:

 This week students were taken through a CD Rom presentation about Michigan’s natural and human features such as cherry trees, the Mackinac Bridge, the Great Lakes, Sleeping Bear Dunes, and the Soo Locks to name just a few.  Then student chose one  natural or human feature to write about.  Their paragraph had to restate the question, state whether it was a human or natural features as well as its importance to Michigan.  

Science:

Science groups conducted a hands-on experiment.  Their focus question  to guide their experiment was, “ How much water can a dry sponge soak up?”  This experiment required students to accurately find the mass of a dry sponge and the mass of a wet sponge using gram pieces, and a pan balance.  Then they had to subtract the mass of the dry sponge from the wet sponge.  Students are doing so well working cooperatively to conduct their experiments.    

This Week in Word Study and Grammar:

 Writing: 

This week the students worked to publish their first small moment story.  We will be taking a close look at our writing and using the rubric to see what areas we still need to work on.  We will then launch into another two weeks where we will go deeper with personal narrative before we begin informational writing.  We also did a fun Halloween writing activity this week applying some of the different grammar skills we have learned.  The students had to write 8 sentences/clues about themselves and then underline all of the nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns and adjectives.  Then we took fun and scary pictures for them to place under the ghost to reveal the student behind the clues.  

Reading: 

This week we talked about the many different ways that readers "climb the hurdle of hard words." The students applied these strategies during their independent reading time and we have been talking about the importance of "stopping and thinking" when something doesn't make sense instead of just reading on. We will continue to apply these strategies both in whole group and small group instruction.  Next week we will begin a new unit on Character Studies.