Does this scenario play out at your house after a school day? Asking your child about their day can be a great opportunity to find out what your child is excited about each day. Here are a few starters.
What is your favorite part of each day? What makes it great?
What is something new and unexpected this year? Name one person who is always kind to you and how they are kind. Who do you think needs a friend? Could that friend be you? What are you hoping to get to do tomorrow? What part of the day do you get to use your imagination the most?
Have you taken a peek at our #classroombookaday Padlet?
We are almost a full month into the school year, and our classroom is really starting to hum. I hope your child is enjoying third-grade and buzzing with ideas and excitement for school this year.
Here is a glimpse at what we've been up to the past two weeks, some reminders, requests, and a few things to look forward to!
Reading
We continue to build our stamina as readers and think about what environment is best for our independent reading time. We talked a lot this week about what to do when we feel ourselves getting distracted, tired, or uncomfortable. Our reading environment is an important factor in our reading stamina. Students worked to make good decisions and problem solve when they found themselves drifting from their book.
We started reading Because of Winn Dixie this week as our chapter book read aloud. This is one of my favorites to read to third graders (but I'm pretty sure I've said that about all our read alouds so far).
Writing
We clarified our understanding of some of our writing tools and continue to work on our personal narrative unit of study. Students have many tools to utilize throughout the writing workshop. I've seen some great storytellers emerge in our classroom and lots of smiles during our writing block.
Math
We continue to work on representing multiplication problems in many ways. Even students who mentally solve math problems often benefit from multiple representations of mathematical thinking. Students have page 29 and 30 as homework this weekend if they did not already finish it at school.
Here students are sharing their independent practice examples with the class.
Students sharing examples.
Social Studies
This week we reviewed landforms found in Michigan as well as discussed the many bodies of water, their characteristics and how they were formed. We also touched on vegetation and climate, discussing the impacts of temperature and the great lakes on precipitation. A favorite legend to share with students is the story of sleeping bear dunes. Here is a short video we watched explaining the famous story.
Celebrations!
Last Friday we celebrated #DotDay2017! This celebratory day is inspired by the story by Peter H. Reynolds call The Dot. Take a look!
We had to make a green and white dot on green and white day!
Reminders:
Sharing (show and tell) is an opportunity for your child to talk about something important! Each child's snack day is also sharing day.
Annabelle is sharing pictures from a trip!
Library books are due on Tuesday's.
Miss Miller (music teacher) sent home a yellow note regarding recorder purchases. Please be sure to fill out and return the form as soon as you can! If you need another form, please let me know.
October 10th is the official start of conference week. I will be sending home information early next week to begin setting up dates and times to meet with you.
October 12th is a half day, and there is no school on October 13th.
October 31st is a 1/2 day of school as well as the Halloween party and school parade! The parade will be at 10:00 a.m. through the halls of FPE. Our party will consist of snacks and hopefully (crossing my fingers we will have finished the book) we will watch the movie Because of Winn Dixie.
Requests:
Two items we could use in our classroom are--
White Notecards (Blank or Lined)
Containers of Wet Ones brand hand wipes
Carnival Basket News!
Our basket theme will be fishing. I will send home more detailed information regarding donations for our contribution to the carnival. I am also open to a volunteer helping me organize and pack up the basket. If you are unfamiliar with the classroom carnival basket, stay tuned! For most of you...this is old hat. :)
Here is a look at what we've been up to this week!
If you have missed a post from last week, feel free to go back to the main screen, scroll, and read. Typically I will update with a post (newsletter) every two weeks at a minimum.
Do you have a Twitter account? I will occasionally post snippets of our day using my personal Twitter account, @Betsy_writes and will include @FPE_Olivet and #EagleNationPride. You can search any of these to see our latest tweets.
We finished our first chapter book read-aloud, The Hundred Dresses. It is a favorite of mine to share at the beginning of the year. Our new classroom chapter book read-aloud is The Night Crossing.
Reading
Students continue to choose books that are part of a healthy reading diet. We discussed selecting books that are not only at our reading level but that also are of interest or maybe different from what we typically read. It is always my goal to stretch students' reading lives to explore books that include both a variety of text types but also grow them as readers.
Every morning we do something called, "The Reading Minute." Through next week I will continue to "host" the reading minute portion of our day. This week I read two different page spreads from a favorite nonfiction picture book and two poems. After next week I will be putting a sign-up sheet in the classroom to open up the reading minute for student led selections. Any day that is left available I will fill in myself. Students can share a favorite paragraph from their independent reading, maybe a news article, a poem, or anything that takes about a minute to read and is appropriate for a school audience. This gives students an opportunity to practice reading in front of a group and a chance to share text they enjoy. It is completely optional but I will be encouraging students to give it a try. Consider starting to collect text for the reading minute that your child might like to read for the class. Maybe even practice a few times at home!
Writing
Writing exercises have been a focus as we begin to expand our writing workshop routines. This week we did a stamina challenge exercise, people/memory exercise, and a four box exercise to work our writing muscles.
Math
We continue to work on noticing groups and efficiently multiplying items within groups to find solutions to both word problems and equations. This week we focused on determining what information was shared within a problem and what was unknown. Ask your child to explain our two math vocabulary words of the week: factor, product.
Spelling
This week students reviewed a handful of consonant sounds and we explored the many different spellings that can take the "shape" of these sounds. We will continue to review and discuss all 44 phonemes (sounds) as we launch into our individual spelling plans. Our main focus for a majority of the school year will be on the many different vowel patterns that occur in print. There will be occasional spelling homework with a majority of the tasks completed during the school day. Spelling tests on frequently misspelled sight words that are expected to be mastered this year will occur as needed. I base most of my spelling instruction on student needs and what they are doing within their writing pieces. Please let me know if you have any questions regarding spelling instruction or expectations.
