What's Your Child Buzzing About?

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. :)