Newsletter for March 14, 2014

Important Dates & Reminders

*I will try to highlight new dates and information with red text.

March 18, 2014: 3rd Grade Musical Performance 7pm
Please have your student wear green. Instruments are due Monday, March 17th.

As part of our going green initiative, the third grade would like to offer up a trade. We are encouraging families to bring in plastic grocery bags to trade for reusable grocery bags. We plan on donating the plastic grocery bags to the humane society and in exchange hope you and your family will continue the message of going green by using your new reusable bag at the grocery store. We look forward to seeing you Tuesday night at 6:45pm for the 7pm performance.

March 19, 2014: Early release for professional development

March 27, 2014: End of the third quarter

March 28 - April 4, 2014: No school - Spring Break

April 9, 16, 23, 30, May 7: Running Club from 3:00 till 3:45 with Mrs. Dobies and other teachers. The cost is $5.00 to benefit the Wish Run's charity (to be determined). Mrs. Nolan's weekly family newsletter will include the registration form. If you have questions, please contact Mrs. Dobies at pdobies@uaschools.org.

April 7, 2014: No school for students, teacher grading day

April 14, 2014: 3rd quarter progress reports sent home

NOTE CHANGE: New dates for the Ohio Achievement Assessments.

May 6, 2014: 3rd Grade Reading Ohio Achievement Assessment for all students. Please avoid appointments and absences.

May 7, 2014: 3rd Grade Mathematics Ohio Achievement Assessment for all students. Please avoid appointments and absences.

June 9-13, 2014: Thurber Summer Writing Camp (Registration is limited and closes May 4th.)
Student writers should consider registering for the Thurber Writing Summer Camp. Registration is available at http://thurberhouse.org/summer-camp1.html

What We Learned This Week

Dear Families

Word Study
We studied compound words this week. Recognizing compound words supports decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling). Spelling and vocabulary assessments will come home on Monday. I am emphasizing parts-of-speech with students and including it in their assessments as it will correct many grammatical errors in speech and writing.

We concluded our "loop group" of cursive letters (e.g., l, e, f, etc.) and introduced the "hills and valleys" group (e.g., n, m, v, etc.). We are nearly done with cursive. I will encourage students to use in in short writings, e.g., spelling tests and reading notes.

We differentiated between common and proper nouns and studied the difference between the sounds the consonant c can make: hard /k/ as in cat and the soft /s/ as in ice as well as the differences between g sounds: hard /g/ sound as in gum and the soft /j/ sound as in age.

We continue to review syllable types throughout our word study lessons: open, closed, vowel-consonant-silent e, and vowel teams.

Reading Workshop
We continued CLOSE reading this week. It is an instructional strategy that uses multiple readings of a text to do different tasks (e.g., find the main idea, ask questions, etc.) that help students improve their comprehension. We are working on improving our main idea or summary statements after we finish our multiple CLOSE activities.

I continue to work with individuals and small groups on their specific reading goals and strategies ranging from choosing just right books to writing plays based on books they've read.

Writing
Students began planning and drafting a multi-paragraph persuasive essay on whether English Language Arts or Mathematics are more important. I will send this home in another week or so.

Encourage your student to commit to a good research topic this weekend. I introduced their first free-choice research project this week and they chose materials from the library today.

Math
We continued our geometry unit, but also delved deeper into comparing fractions. We have looked at fractions several different ways.

- Equivalent fractions
- Comparing fractions with the same denominator
- Comparing fractions with the same numerator
- Comparing fractions to 1/2
- Cross multiplying fractions (I don't call it cross-multiplying and my emphasis is on understanding the operation. Comparing fractions with the same denominator is the easiest analysis and cross multiplying allows them to do this.)

Here are some photos from last week's Barbi Bungee.