Room 35 Class Family Newsletter
September 4-September 15
Growing as writers, readers, mathematicians, and scientist
Writers:
As writers we have been working on growing a passion for writing through discussing what kinds of things writers write about. We have learned that writers gather inspiration from their own lives: recording and retelling important events in their lives. We are in the beginning stages of Narrative Writing. I am excited to see these third grade writers grow as they learn how to write small moment stories through story teller voices that help their reader feel like they were living the moment with them.We have also launched our first stages of learning cursive. We are practicing different motions that writers use to help as we begin to learn to write letters in cursive
How you can help at home: Help your student gather and make list of important stories from their lives. Whether it's a special birthday memory, a special trip, or something your family does every week writing lists of events will help your writer as they embark on telling these events through story.
Readers:
We have been learning a lot about how we will spend time reading in our classroom and how to create the best reading environment in our room. We've realized that Reading Workshop and Book clubs are times to enjoy books so we need to have books we love to read. We have learned what a too hard book feels like and what a fun and easy book feels like. We decided when we are choosing books we should read the first page to see if a book is fun and easy- if we run into to too many words we don't know or if the book doesn't make sense we realized you should put that book back and choose another one.
How you can help at home:
Help your reader choose fun and easy books. Books should feel fun and make sense. If your reader would like to enjoy a book that isn't quite in their "reading reach" yet then read that book to them!
Scientist:
We have been learning a lot about matter and how matter changes! We loved being able to watch a solid turn to a liquid through melting and a liquid turn into a gas through boiling and evaporation. We even realized the states of matter were changing because when heat is added the molecules want to spread out and that changes them into the next state of matter. Wow!
How you can help at home:
Have conversations about different states of matter and how they are changing around your house and places you go. If you're boiling pasta during dinner ask your third grade scientist why there appears to be steam coming from the pot. If there was a puddle in the side walk earlier and now there's not ask them what happened to the water. Explaining their thinking increases their understanding of concepts!
Mathematicians:
As mathematicians we have been studying about place value, ordering numbers, comparing numbers, and have just started studying rounding numbers. We are realizing the place is where a digit is located in a number (ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc) and the value is how much that digit is actually worth (a 5 in the tens places means 50). Understanding the place and value of a number is essential for students as we move onto to using numbers in a different way.
How you can help at home:
As we study rounding this week ask your mathematician to help you round numbers you encounter. You could ask them to help you round prices at the grocery store or the amount of Legos they used to create their building. We are using the language which ten do you think it's closest to? As we move on to rounding to the nearest hundred we challenge ourselves to think about which hundred we the think the number is closest to.
Picture day
Tuesday, Oct 3, 2017, 10:00 AM
Dutch Fork Elementary School, Broad River Road, Irmo, SC, United States
Third Grade T-shirts
Quotes from our week...
"Yesterday my mom was cooking and the liquid boiled and I saw what looked like gas so I think the liquid is going to turn into a gas when we add heat" -Mateo
"I was looking for a book so I tried to read the first page and it felt too hard so I went and got a fun and easy book" -Naomi
"I had a problem that didn't make sense so I asked Joshua for help because he was close to me" -Alia
"I wanted to write a book but I didn't know what to write about so I wrote about my weekend" - Mya