Ninja Pig News
Mrs. Caldwell's Classroom
Jan. 23-27th and Jan. 30-Feb.3rd
Weekly Hellos
It's a little late for news about the week of Jan. 23-27th but I'm going to fill you in about our week and give you a glimpse into the next week of learning!
Can you believe it's almost February already? I cannot believe this at all!
Things are moving faster and faster around here. We are moving deeper into reading comprehension, finishing up learning the remaining multiplication strategies, and writing like mad. We're exploring weather and the water cycle in science and economics in social studies.
It's a good time to be a third grader!
Various Things to Read and Respond To
Kindness Month and Week in February
Student Council will be hosting Sommer Elementary’s first ever Kindness Week the week of February 13th. We are hoping to show all of our students how easy it can be to spread kindness to others. We wanted to give everyone ideas about ways to spread kindness by creating a calendar for our classes that has ideas about being kind. We want to challenge you to complete these acts of kindness and to watch it spread around our school. We will have more information about the things we have planned for Kindness week soon.
A digital copy of the Kindness Calendar can be found in the email attached to this newsletter.
Valentine's Day Party
Our Valentine's Day party will be held on Feb. 14th. It will be fun but very low-key. The party is for students only. We won't have parents attend since parking is limited and the party can only occur on one day. I will send out more information about Valentine boxes, valentines, and party foods next week. I will tell you that we have a contest in the room involving creating Valentine boxes so start looking around for a good-sized box to overhaul!!
Giving Gardens
I am about to order the materials for our extra garden beds to be built. There will be one or two work days in February to build these beds if anyone is interested in helping. I'm thinking one will be after school and one will be on a Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. I don't know the dates yet. I have to work out details with the district before finalizing all plans.
STAAR Ready Practice Dates
We are going to give the math and reading STAAR release tests on Tuesday, Feb. 21st and Monday, February 27th. Please do not make any appointments for your children on these days. I also want to remind you that they shouldn't be working the STAAR release tests found on the TEA website. That's what we use to see where your children are excelling and where they are still needing support. If they've seen the tests, this gives us false data. A complete analysis will come home after the tests are given so you can see exactly how your child did. I will also send the tests home for you to look over and return. PLEASE DO NOT WORRY YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT THESE DATES AND THE TESTS!! Trust me. "We got this."
The Class Would Like...
We are all happy and working with what we have.
**We do love vacuuming up crumbs and wiping down tables. I hope they love these chores as much at home....
**IF anyone wants to bring in his/her own fidget tools, that's fine as long as it doesn't become a distraction. Right now, chewy items and putty are the "cat's pajamas" of our classroom.
Homework News
Reading passages will start coming home by mid February. These will be a once a week item because I want students familiar with the testing genre but not constantly practicing this genre.
Look for other assignments to weave their way into our days and weeks.
**Homework should be happening each night, Monday- Thursday.
Class Events
When we start researching, we'll spend a week learning about inventors and a week learning about entrepreneurs to correlate with our next PBL unit on the Economics Fair!!
Writing Workshop- Students will finish writing their fantasy stories using their outlines. We learned about summaries and are using that technique to make sure we have the main details in place. We'll use sensory language and other techniques as stories are unfolded on paper.
We are also adding editing to our skill set. It's really been happening all along but I have focused only on revising the first semester. Now we'll also check more closely at how our grammar, punctuation/capitalization, and spelling are working for us!
Grammar- We will focus on paying attention to compound sentences to make sure they aren't run-on sentences instead. We'll spend more time looking at where writers add in other punctuation to help the reader move through the sentence with better understandings. (Think commas, apostrophes, and parenthesis.)
Math- We are going to finish studying the final multiplication strategies that all third graders need to know. Students will practice old strategies online for homework until mastery is shown. We'll add new facts to practice about every two weeks. For those students who can show mastery of their multiplication facts and know how to check that they are correct, they will work on multi-step problems involving two by one or two by two facts. **The standard algorithm may not be their first strategy...
Social Studies & Science: We have started our weather unit. Students asked me to put easy to make weather tools in the Google HW Classroom. You don't have to make them, but you can if you would like to. We are in the middle of an experiment about temperature and its affect on evaporation. We are also exploring and increasing our understanding of the water cycle. Listen for talk about them while having dinner.
**Our PBL unit involving the school wide Economics Fair is coming up! This is the favorite activity for the whole school!! More info to come.