Newsletter for April 11, 2014

Dear Families,

Enjoy the lovely weekend!

Important Dates & Reminders

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

 

I will be looking for volunteers for a final Tree Trek to Thompson Park as soon as flowers start to appear. Please let me know if you are tentatively interested.

 

Come on over after school with your student and try out the new playground our PTO provided!

 

April 14, 2014: 3rd quarter progress reports sent home. I will also send home students' end of quarter self-reflections. These are VERY hard to do accurately at this age, but I believe it is good to begin this level of self assessment and awareness early. I will or have already gone over these with your student to share my observations and assessments. Please review this with your student, sign it, and return. Thanks!

April 18, 2014: No school

April 25, 2014: Kid Fest 5:00 till 8:00pm (Flyers were sent home today.)

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.

May 10, 2014: Windermere Wish Run for the Ugandan Water Project

May 14, 2014: Early Release at 1:15 for professional development

May 26, 2014: No school: Memorial Day

June 4, 2014: Last day for students

June 5, 2014: Teacher Grading Day

What We Learned This Week

Word Study
We studied parts of speech, specifically nouns (plural and singular), verbs, and adjectives. Students learned most nouns can be made plural by simply adding s. We also discussed exceptions, e.g., mouse = mice. Finally, we studied words ending in a consonant and a y (e.g., fly) and how we replace the y with ies.
We studied words ending in y that make a final long a, long e, or long i sound. Vocabulary and spelling were assessed and will be sent home on Monday.

Reading
Students further developed their ability to summarize what they read. We have moved to longer passages and are covering fiction and non-fiction. Fiction is being summarized by characters, setting, and sequence of events along with identifying a message or lesson. We are using folk tales to help us with this last step. Non-fiction summaries are being taught by restating the main idea of each paragraph of a short passage or each chapter for longer selections. Students are also learning to incorporate important vocabulary from non-fiction texts. Finally, we are working on making inferences based on evidence.

Writing
Students have been writing quite a lot in response to reading (see above) and began a persuasive essay on favorite pets. Students worked in small groups to further develop plans.

Math
Our focus this week was representing and understanding addition of same sized groups as multiplication through equations ("number sentences") and arrays. Students solved the following types of problems:
- 4 + 4 + 4 = 3 x 4 (3 groups of 4)
- Represent arrays as multiplication equations
- Story problems represented as multiplication equations/number sentences
- Breaking arrays into equal groups
- Multiplication fact fluency (This is one area the entire class will need to develop. We are doing daily strategy lessons for multiplication and I'm teaching students that division facts are simply the opposite operation so they don't need to learn division if they master multiplication.)
- Division as multiplication
We are also working heavily on story problems. Many students fail to read questions carefully, a common third grade challenge. We are answering questions by stating the units of measure to help ensure we are actually answering the question asked.

Social Studies
We are studying regions of the US.