3D News
March 2016
Birthdays
Angelina
Violet
Poet of the Week
Brendan
Bella
Maeve
Stella
Jake
Connor
Imagine if your precious nose
were sandwiched in between your toes!
Star of the Week
We are Mathematicians!
- learned about unit fractions
- wrote fractions for regions and sets
- labeled and compared fractions on a number line
- compared fractions using fraction cards
- used multiplication to write equivalent fractions
- wrote mixed numbers and improper fractions
Unit 7:
The Unit 7 family letter went home earlier this week.
This week, we
- practiced our multiplication and division facts
- discovered patterns on the multiplication/division fact table
- learned how to solve number models with parenthesis
- learned how to solve two-step word problems using one number model with parenthesis
- played multiplication games like Multiplication Bingo and Multiplication Baseball
Multiplication Facts
Please continue to encourage your child to practice those multiplication facts each night! Once your child masters the multiplication quiz, he or she will move on to division.
We are Readers!
In the Science Fair, the students used details from the text to understand how the main characters' actions contribute to the sequence of events. We discussed important elements of the plot, especially the problem and solution.
Good readers think about the author's purpose. An author can try to persuade, inform, or entertain the reader. Thinking about the author's purpose is easy as PIE. The students learned about the responsibilities of K-9s in the informational text Aero and Officer Mike.
Good readers think about the characters in the story. They use their background knowledge and details from the story to help make inferences about the characters they read about. The students read about Ramona and Beezus in The Extra Good Sunday.
Students analyzed characters' actions in Yonder Mountain. Students compared and contrasted details about the characters in this story and wrote a journal entry from one character's perspective. The children quickly got in character and wrote creative stories about their journey up the mountain as Black Bear, Grey Wolf, and Soaring Eagle. This story became a 3D favorite!
Grammar
We can:
- identify and write proper nouns in a sentence
- proofread to capitalize proper nouns in a sentence
- form the past tense of regular verbs by adding -ed or changing y to i and add -ed
- identify and include descriptive adjectives in a sentence
Proofreading our writing is important! We are learning how to apply these grammatical concepts in our writing, especially when revising and editing our work for publication.
Vocabulary Strategies
We partnered up with 2B and learned about idioms. We added great pictures books to our classroom library such as Raining Cats and Dogs, The Cat's Pajamas, and Monkey Business.
We learned to use clues within a sentence to determine the meaning of homophones.
We learned about the prefixes im- and in-.
We are Writers!
We celebrated our writing with students in 3H and 3L!
What's Next?
We started the Informational Writing Unit this week! Your child will be encouraged to write about a topic he or she knows a lot about.
We know that authors of informational texts write to teach others about a topic. There are all kinds of experts in our class. Here are some of the topics we'll be teaching each other about:
- golf
- cats
- lacrosse
- hockey
- art
- swimming
- skateboarding
- karate
Thank you for encouraging your child to bring in a book about his or her topic. We will need these during the research and fact checking stage of writing.
Social Studies
- The Statue of Liberty
- The Willis Tower
- The Grand Canyon
- The Golden Gate Bridge
- Mount Rushmore
We had such a great discussion of these places. The students had many connections and loved being able to share their experiences and even family pictures with the class.
Science
We added heat to each mystery chemical. Here's what we observed:
Red: smelled like burnt marshmallow, turned brown/yellow, hardened, turned clear, sticky
Yellow: sizzled, bubbled, hardened
Green: turned a little gray or brown, too a long time to observe reaction
Blue: no change
Orange: turned brown/black, smelled like burnt toast
We cannot wait to find out what the mystery chemicals are!!!
Fun in 3D!
Guest Readers are always a great surprise! Thank you for volunteering to read to us!
Valentine's Day
Read Across America!
Mrs. Gallogly even surprised us as a special guest reader during the week! She brought her good friend, Hedgie, and read Hedgie's Surprise.