News From Room 2108
Mr. Donnellon's Newsletter
General Classroom News: The Odds & Ends
Dear Third Grade Parents,
Thank you for taking the time to meet with me for Parent/Teacher Conferences this past month. It was a pleasure to meet with you and share a little bit about your child's school life and performance in the classroom. Remember, on evenings where your child has little or no homework, students are always encouraged to work on Raz-kids (all students' reading levels have recently been adjusted), Think Central (students can use the games to reinforce concepts taught in class and work on math facts), and Typing Web (this is a program to increase typing skills and performance). Students use these programs weekly at school and are able to log in independently. If you or your child experience any difficulty using these programs at home, please contact me.
With Winter Break only a week away, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you a healthy, relaxing, and restful break and warm wishes for the Holiday Season!
Curriculum Connection
Reader's Workshop: Informational Reading: Understanding Expository, Narrative, and Hybrid Text
In this Informational Reading unit, third graders strengthen their skills in understanding expository, narrative, and hybrid informational texts.
Concept 1: Readers determine importance and synthesize when reading informational
text; readers learn strategies that help them determine the main idea and
supporting details and fit all the text together as they become "experts" on
the topics they are reading about.
Concept 2: Readers determine text structures and synthesize when reading
informational text; readers use their knowledge of the way informational text
is organized to notice descriptive, chronological, comparison, cause and effect
and problem and solution structures within and across sections of text.
Concept 3: Readers fit text together to teach others; readers learn strategies for
overcoming the challenges of solving unknown words and their meanings
and fitting that learning into the text for understanding.
Concept 4: Readers will learn ways to differentiate and read narrative informational,
hybrid informational, and expository text. Readers learn that similar strategic
work is required for understanding all types of informational text.
Writer's Workshop: Informational Writing: Personal Expertise
Mathematics Workshop: Measurement, Time, and Graphs
In unit 3, students explore customary and metric measurement, time concepts, and graphing. Students extend their measurements skills for length, capacity, weight, and mass. They measure lengths to a quarter inch, and add, subtract, multiply, and divide measurement to solve problems. Students learn to tell time to the hour, half hour, quarter hour, five minutes and one minute, as well as find elapsed time. Students represent time on a clock as well as number line and use these models to solve problems. Additionally, this unit presents opportunities to explore categorical data displayed on tables, pictographs, bar graphs, and line plots. In grade 3, students' work with data and time is closely related to fraction concepts, computations with the four operations, and the number line.