Newsletter for December 11, 2015

Dear Families,

This year is flying by! I can't believe we only have two weeks left in this grading period. I will be assessing students next week in reading and mathematics prior to break. Please let me know if your student will be leaving early for break.

I hope everyone has a relaxing and safe holiday. There will not be a newsletter next week.

What We Learned This Week

Word Study

We started learning our cursive. I will emphasize lower-case and reading, once we have gone through all of the lower-case letter forms. Students are encouraged to trace the shape (bottom-up), use a relaxed grip (many students grip the pencil too hard as they are concentrating and it hurts their hand and their handwriting also suffers), use a good posture with feet on the floor, tilt their paper to get a nice slant, circle their best cursive letter on each line (it's helpful to notice differences in letters), and attend to letter connections (how letters are built off of each other, e.g., the c shape is the basis for the a, d, g and q shapes).

In the spirit of the district's 1:1 plan for student devices, I handed out my very "expensive and fragile" laminated keyboards. Keyboarding is such an important skill that I am spending a few minutes each day familiarizing students with where the letters are on the keyboard and proper finger-key assignments.

We are concluding our noun study. Students are have learned the differences between proper and common nouns and singular and plural nouns. We know most singular nouns can simply add an -s to make them plural (e.g., key keys) and if we add a syllable, we need to add -es to make them plural (e.g., lunch lunches).

Reading Workshop

Students are developing their ability to use context clues to decode and, more importantly, comprehend unfamiliar words. We do this using short passages with missing or made up (ala Seuss) words.

Writing Workshop 

We are writing (and will publish next week) our pen pal letters. Students are telling a bit about themselves, what they plan to do over winter break and are recommending a book to their pen pals. We will email these to make sure our pen pals receive them before they go on break. We are spending a lot of time on planning, drafting and rereading. Students use simple rubrics to ensure they have all of the important parts of each paragraph and reread their work with partners. "Debates" make these authentic writings even more important to the students and they are giving great effort.

Science

Who knew dirt was so fun!? We started our classroom garden. We are going to try to grow carrots, spinach, pumpkins, catnip, chamomile and lavender.

I don't know if we will see any snow this year, but in anticipation of winter break, I wanted to go ahead and share my snow day homework. If we do have a snow day and students are asked to do homework, my plan is to have them log on to the following website, choose a science experiment, attempt it and send me a photo of them doing it. You may want to try some of these over break if you're looking for something to do or get cabin fever (if it ever gets cold). Have fun!

http://pbskids.org/zoom/activities/sci/

Math Workshop

I will assess students understanding of multiplication on Monday of next week. I will mark the assessments and return them so they can attempt to correct any operational errors. Students should be able to:
- Represent addition of same sized groups as multiplication: 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 4 x 3 (or 4 groups of 3)
- Represent multiplication as an array or area model (and vice versa)
- Rewrite one and two step story problems as equations and solve.
- Use rounding to estimate products.
- Solve equations using multiples of ten by recognizing the base facts.
- Apply the associative, commutative, and distributive properties to multiplication statements.
- Fill in the blanks in a multiplication chart (number of groups, amount in each group, total).
- Identify the number of ones, tens and hundreds in a three digit number.

Not many students seem to have jumped on the Front Row Math website. If you would like to try a different one, you can try out the much lauded Khan Academy. To make an account and get started, log in to https://www.khanacademy.org/

Important Dates and Reminders

I will highlight new and changed dates on subsequent posts in red.

Please visit the holiday party sign-up. Thank you room parents for all of your hard work!
http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0a4fa9af2ea02-3rdgrade

December 21 through January 1 - Winter Break

January 8 - End of Second Quarter
January 11 - No School Teacher Grading Day
January 18  - No School Martin Luther King Day
January 21 - Conferences, Early Dismissal at 11:05, NO LUNCH SERVICE
January 27 - Early Dismissal Professional Development 1pm

February 1 through 16 - Ohio Wildlife Center donation drive
February 15 - No School Presidents' Day
February 16 - Ohio Wildlife Center Visit

March 2 - Early Dismissal Professional Development 1pm
March 18 - End of Third Quarter
March 21 through 25 - No School Spring Break
March 28 - No School Teacher Grading Day

April 6 - Early Dismissal Professional Development 1pm
April 12 and 13 - Ohio English Language Arts Assessment
April 20 and 21 - Ohio Mathematics Assessment

May 27 - Last Day of School for Students