Third Grade News
September 2015
Mark Your Calendars
Thursday, September 10 - Picture Day
Friday, September 11 - Midterms
- Midterms will not be sent home with every student this year. Please check the portal for up to date grades for your student.
Thursday, September 17 - Fun Run Pep Rally at School
- This will be the kick off to our PTA fundraiser for this year
September 23-24 - Early Release/ Parent Teacher Conference
- Look for more information in regards to signing up in your child's Friday Folder
Reading Rocks
We had a wonderful 25 Books Campaign Kick-Off! All third grade students gathered in the Media Center to hear Lt. Dusik read Officer Buckles and Gloria and Mayor Johnny Crist read Hooray for Reading Day! The students know their reading levels, signed their reading contracts, and are ready to read!
Please support your child by helping them locate the books required as noted on the parent letter (green paper).
The 25 Books Campaign is meant to complete at home. Please keep the 25 Books Campaign folder at home until the last Thursday in each month. On the last Thursday of the month, send the folders to school for me review their work. They should have four books read and documented by September 24, 2015.
If you have any questions, please send me an email.
We will continue to learn about fiction books, figurative language, and Paul Revere.
Reading is Wonderful!
Writing for Success
The students have worked hard and we have come up with a slew of wonderful seed ideas. Now we’re off and running and focusing on paragraphs! We’re discussing how paragraphs help us to organize our thoughts, which is an especially useful skill when writing long papers. We’ve discussed how all paragraphs must have a topic sentence, three to five supporting sentences and a concluding sentence. Please continue to help your child at home by making sure that all sentences they write are written correctly, ie, begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark. Students will be quizzed on the parts of a paragraph in the next week or two.
Once we have an understanding of paragraphs we will move into creating narrative samples. These samples will become one of their two summative writing grades for this quarter. We will practice creating narratives by focusing on settings, characters, problem and solution and finally conclusions. My goal is for students to have completed a summative writing sample by the end of September. These summative writing samples will be completed entirely in class.
Grammar Fun
We’re finally getting through our review of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and proper nouns. This past week we reviewed these grammar structures and quizzed on them as well. Be sure to check the parent portal or go through my eClass with your students to keep up with your child’s grades. As I shared in our previous newsletter, our next skill in grammar will focus on abstract versus concrete nouns to be followed by regular and irregular past tense verbs. As a general rule you can add “ed” to a verb in order to form the past tense. Irregular past tense verbs do not follow this rule, the spelling pattern will actually change completely. For example, swim becomes swam, run becomes ran, fly becomes flew, etc… Please check my eClass page (2016 PACKARD J. THIRD GRADE CORE), students should all have it pinned, for extra links to review these grammar skills with your child.
Our goal is to complete these skills, review them and finally assess the week of September 14. This will be one of the two summative assessment grades that your child will receive in writing this quarter.
Math Corner
After testing, we will begin our unit on multiplication and division. We will begin this unit with learning ways to solve for a product or a quotient. Students will be making anchor charts to help them with these concepts. While we are learning ways to solve, it is important that your child begin working on fact fluency. Flash cards are a great way to help them learn these facts. You can usually purchase them at the dollar store. Another option is to have your child make their own using notecards. Students are required to know facts through 12's. Knowing their multiplication facts is important to success in the following grades.
Investigating Science
Word Study
Social Studies Update
Special's News
Art Corner
This month in 3rd grade, your students are creating beautiful self-portraits that we can display in the halls so the whole school can see their beautiful faces. We were inspired by the portrait art of Chuck Close and will use his grids and photo-realistic style to create a mixed media self-portrait. This project has us practicing measuring with rulers, mixing paint colors, and facial proportions.
- Ms. Brodnax