Mrs. G's Classroom News
October 14, 2016
Classroom Management
Hornung's Halloween parade will be Monday morning at 9:05am. We will have our classroom party directly following it until it is time for recess. We will have recess around 11am. I am sending a sign-up genius sometime this weekend to recruit parents to volunteer and donate items for the Halloween Party. We will have stations of fun activities, games and more. Please consider signing up to help - it will be a spooktacular time! Please remember our many food allergies in our classroom this year. Because of it, our donated items are very specific to keep all students safe and healthy.
Please keep using my website calendar and other links. This website is updated as frequently as possible and has a color-coded calendar of events for our classroom, school and district!
Writing Workshop
This week in writing workshop we learned about powerful endings by studying real, published books and tried out our own for our personal narratives. We also discovered the difference between revise and edit. We learned about editing marks and the importance of editing in order for the reader to understand what is being said. Many students are almost done with constructing our neat rough drafts and we will be moving on to the publishing stage next week. I can't wait to see how these stories turn out!
Math
I was pleased with the unit one math assessment results. Everyone did a pretty good job. The corrected math assessment should be in your child's Friday folder today. We moved on to unit two and have learned about extended addition and subtraction problems. We learned that knowing our basic math facts can help with longer, harder equations. We also learned about how to solve number stories. We used diagrams to help sort information from a word problem to help us find out if we should add or subtract. To see more about this unit you can visit http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/parents/3rd-grade/em4-at-home/unit_2/ .
Reading Workshop
We continued predictions and retelling this week. We "followed the yellow brick road of retelling" where we said who the characters were, settin, what the problem of the story is, what happens in the beginning, then next, after and finally a solution. We logged our reading using our virtual book shelf on biblionasium.com and many students met the challenge of logging at home at least two times! Keep reading at home! It makes a difference! At the end of the week we also had a conversations about grit. In third grade readers do need to have stamina and be willing to work hard to tackle more difficult text. We watched a video on grit and tried to see how having grit in our reading lives can make us a better reader. On friday we did the five steps on our online program called Achieve 3000 that will help us with our M-Step test in the late spring.
Grit: The Key to Your Success at FLVS
Word Work
We did great with Lesson 5 this week. We were introduced to soft c and g. This lesson has a very interesting snake story that goes with it and I am hoping it will help us remember the rule when it comes to soft c and g. We were at least entertained though! The letters i, e and y are considered to be snake letters and when a snake letter follows a c the c makes it say snake language /s/. For g, when a snake letter follows it, the snake bites off part of the g to make it say /j/.
Science / Social Studies
We finished our unit on sound. The graded test should be in your child's Friday folder today. We are now studying light. We watched a brainpop jr. video on this form of energy and started our light stations. In our stations we are conducting experiments with flashlights, exploring transparent, translucent and opaque objects, discovering what refraction is, watching a wonderopolis video and article and reading a big screen Epic book. Stations are fun!
In social studies the students learned about bodies of water, state symbols and much more! Learning about Michigan is fun, too!