Newsletter for March 11, 2016

What We Learned This Week

Word Study
Students continued with last week's patterns (i vowel patterns and -ing verb rules). I also introduced articles a, an, and the. a is used before nouns or adjective/noun combinations when the adjective or noun begins with a consonant sound; an is used before a vowel sound, and the is used when referencing a specific thing(s).

Reading Workshop
Students responded to texts, constructing opinion pieces that used personal opinion and cited the text. The greatest area for improvement is taking the next step to explicitly explain why the opinion and reference support a student's opinion. Without adding the because students are simply copying the essay. I think they made great strides through sharing and critiquing. We will continue this next week.

Emily Arrow

Students were treated to the music of Emily Arrow, a gifted young song writer who turns books into song.

Writing Workshop
Students finished drafting, editing and publishing pen pals. This also gave them experience keyboarding and using Google Docs to share work with me.

Math Workshop
We are firmly into measurement. Students continued to review time and all of its facets (reading analog clocks to the minute; recognizing quarter past, half past, quarter till and o'clock; determining elapsed time, start time and end time). We also started measurement to the nearest quarter inch and nearest centimeter. This provided us with a good opportunity to review fractions. We also began studying line plots, bar graphs, area and perimeter. Some students still confuse area and perimeter. I remind them that area is similar to array (a model of multiplication) and perimeter has the word rim in it.

Science
Students are working on presenting their inventions. We are emphasizing presentation skills (engaging their audience, projecting their voices, using their boards and prototypes to present, etc.). I'm really pleased with this year's work and I am excited to share it next Friday.

Art
Students are working on weaving in art with Dr. Myers.

Important Dates & Reminders

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

There will not be a newsletter next week. I'm looking forward to seeing you at the Invention Convention. Have a lovely spring break!

March 14 - recycled instruments due
March 15 - Voting Day, students eat in the classroom. No peanut products please.
March 17 - 3rd Grade Musical Performance directed by Mrs. Delcamp 7:00-7:30pm.
March 18 - Invention Convention 10:00-10:45am
March 18 - End of 3rd quarter
March 21 through 25 - Spring Break No School
March 28 - No School Teacher Grading Day

Please make sure your student has a working pair of headphones or earbuds for April testing! There will be auditory components to the state math test.

April 5 - Progress Reports sent home
April 6 - Early Dismissal Professional Development 1pm
April 12 & 13 - Ohio English Language Arts Assessment
April 20 & 21 - Ohio Mathematics Assessment
April 29 - Kids Fest 5 till 8pm

May 27 - Last Day of School for Students