Dear Families,
Even though school will look a lot different this year, I am still excited and committed to bringing the best education possible and the best experiences possible even though we will be learning online for the first couple months. I am excited to team up with you this year! More information to come! Enjoy the last weeks of summer! Kait Davidson
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Hello!
I hope you had a great time at the Family Dance if you attended! There was quite the excitement about it this week! With Thanksgiving Break approaching, we still have a lot of learning taking place and are using each day to teach and learn. It is important your child is at school and on time. If your child is going to be gone, please let me know, so I can plan and prepare accordingly. Thank you! Math: We worked on some more multiplication problems and using strategies to efficiently solve problems involving multiplication. We started a brief introduction to division last week. Students solved story problems involving both multiplication and division. I also introduced the Slide and Ladders Game to the class. They are LOVING the game. I took a poll on who has played it at home to get an idea of how many students have been practicing their facts. It would be awesome if you could be playing some sort of multiplication game at home whether it is Slides and Ladder or Multiplication War. If you need another copy of the game, please reach out! How can I support my child at home with math? -Play multiplication math games!! Writing: Students have been working on their opinion piece. They have all come up with a sentence stating their opinion and three reasons to support their opinion. We are working to also support our reasons using facts, example, or mini stories. Students learned this week the important of hooking their reader and also including their opinion in the introduction. Ask your child what they are writing their opinion piece on! :) Reading: We finished our mystery unit and celebrated by being crime solvers while watching an episode Scooby Doo. We talked about the mystery, who there crime solvers were, the clues, if there were any red herring clues, and worked on retelling what we watched. Students took an assessment showing me how their reading skills have improved. Skills such as making an inference and summarizing their reading. Thanks to the parents who have been asking their child questions about what they are reading! I can see a difference in those students already! We will be starting our new unit: reading to learn. This unit teaches students how to identify the main idea of a non-fiction article or text. Students will need to spend some of their time reading non-fiction books so they can practice these skills. I will be sending home the information for this unit this week. Be on the look out for it so you can support your child at home with what we are doing at school. We also started a new read aloud book called Fish In A Tree. We are only three chapters in but it has been incredibly powerful so far. Students ask daily if we will be able to read more of it! We have had lots of incredible discussions. Ask your child what it is about! Science: We started looking at how plants/flowers are created and how it takes two parent flowers to create another baby flower. We will continue looking at the traits of plants as well. See our pictures from the last couple weeks! So many exciting things have been going on in our classroom. We got to meet our Kindergarten buddies, we had out first Art Lit, and the students finished their narrative pieces they worked so hard on! Math: As I shared at conferences, we finished our first math unit that included rounding to the nearest 10 and 100, adding and subtracting 3-digit numbers. We have started our next unit which is the introduction to multiplication and division. Students started the unit by figuring out the total cost of groups of stamps. We discovered there were so many strategies we could use to solve for the total. Below is an example. Ways to support your child in math? -Start playing the Slides and Ladder Game I sent home. It will be HARD for them if they are starting multiplication for the first time but it would be great practice. -Draw pictures similar to the stamps above and ask them to write a multiplication equation for the picture. Reading: We are working through our mystery unit now where students are working on skills such as: inferring/predicting, identifying who the crime solver is, and what the mystery is, and summarizing. These skills will be assessed for the second time this year in the next weeks. How can you support your child in reading? Ask them their five finger summary! Use the picture below to help. Writing: We finished our narrative writing unit and are on to opinion writing! Students brought in their collections from home or use a dragon collection at school as a way to judge items. Students learned there are 3 ways to fairly judge items. See the picture below! Here are some pictures! I can't believe it has already been a month! The students are settling in and getting into the routine of our classroom. I am really enjoying them a lot! They are so sweet! They have been hard at work! Math: We spent the last few weeks rounding numbers to the nearest 10 and 100. This past week we worked on adding 3 digit numbers. Something important to note is that you will NOT see students adding using the standard algorithm. That is a 4th grade standard and is something they specifically focus on in 4th grade. A lot of the time students are borrowing and carrying over and have no idea why. Students in third grade are adding by using expanded form. We encourage you to work with your child at home with this method. Here is an example: Writing: This week in writing we worked on writing our small moment stories. Students picked their small moment story and began drafting it. Students learned how to make a better beginning (lead) to their story by starting with either dialogue, a sound effect, the setting, or action. They chose their favorite and then revised their story. Literacy: This week students learned the word inference and how it is similar to the word prediction. Students should be making inferences as they read their personal books. This is a very important reading skill! We have been using this sentence frame: I infer ________ because the story said ____________. Ask students what they predict or infer is going to come next in their book AND what makes them think that based on what they've read so far. Science: We started our first science unit: Traits, Heredity, and Adaptations. We will take a look at traits, heredity, and adaptations in humans, animals, and plants. Students learned about inherited traits vs learned behaviors. Students worked on identifying what traits are inherited and what behaviors are learned. I.e. eye color is inherited but speaking English is a learned behavior. Here are a couple activities students completed! Art Fun
Last week we had some fun with an art project. Students used torn construction paper to decorate a leaf template. They are beautifully displayed in our classroom window! Thank you to all of you who came to Curriculum Night. It was great meeting you and chatting with you! I feel so lucky to have this group of students this year. They are all incredibly sweet and show a high interest in learning. I am excited to see how much they grow this year! Take a look at what we have been up to! Math We started off math by reviewing place value. Last year second graders focused mainly on the ones place and the tens place. In third grade, we add the hundreds place. Students used base ten blocks to to help identify different numbers and be able to represent numbers in different ways. For example: Standard Form: 234 Expanded Form: 200 + 30 + 4 Unit Form: 200 hundreds, 3 tens, and 4 ones We are trying to solidify the idea of 5 tens = 50 and not 5. It is a very common mistake. How can I help my child at home? Have them identify different numbers! For example... Ask them what number is 4 hundreds, 3 tens, and 7 ones? OR What number is 5 hundreds, 12 tens, and 14 ones? Writing We started the year by writing whatever the students wanted to write. :) Students brainstormed ideas of what they could write about by thinking of important people, places or activities they enjoy. After a week of working on our writing stamina, we started to brainstorm true stories. Students thought of stories that connected with different feelings. We also thought of times we did something for the first time and times we did something for the last time or a time when we learned something. Students will spend a couple more days generating ideas and then choose their favorite to eventually turn into their personal narrative. Reading We worked on different ways we could make reading be the best this year. For instance: Finding a good reading spot Talking about books, not just reading them Finding a way to share books we love Finding the right book at our reading level I have been assessing students to figure out their current reading level. Eventually all students will have a giant pink bookmark showing their reading level and current goal they are working on. How can I help my child at home? Sit down and read with your child. Please :) It is SO beneficial if they have someone to talk to about their books. Third grade is a big reading year. It is no longer learning to read it is reading to learn and it is being able to support your thinking with evidence from the text. Ask your child questions about their book and what did they read in their book that made them think that? We will be working on these important skills (comprehending, predicting, and summarizing) below because they help students understand what they are reading in their books. If they can't answer these their book is most likely above their reading level. Social Emotional Learning As I mentioned at Curriculum Night, the number one factor of raising a child who is less likely to struggle with anxiety, depression, or be more healthy, and intelligent had nothing to do with academics but with eating a meal around the dinner table. The Atlantic Monthly found that our culture is experiencing more negative effects physically and psychologically on families and kids because of the lack of meals around a table. This year my challenge to your family is to share at least one meal around the table a week. Below is the link of the article I shared at Curriculum Night.
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/on-parenting/taking-back-the-family-dinner-how-we-created-a-mealtime-renaissance/2019/08/19/b3d8c4e8-82ee-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html If you open the link on your phone or google Taking Back the Family Dinner on your phone, it is free to read. I am looking forward to starting a new school year as well as meeting all of you! Stay tuned for more information this school year! I will see you the first day of school and on curriculum night, September 12th.
Thank you to all the volunteers this year! I truly can't thank you enough for helping take a load off. I hope you were able to attend the volunteer thank you and hear the 3rd grader's thank you song. So cute! Math: We continued to work on finding the area and perimeter of shapes. It can be a very tricky concept! We also began reading graphs and interpreting the data on the graphs. We are headed in the direction of geometry next. Reading: We started reading fractured fairy tales. This week we got to read a fractured version of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. Ask them about both books and see how the author changed the original story. The students loved them! Coming up, students will have the opportunity to write their own fractured fairy tale. We will continue to read more to help inspire them with their upcoming writing piece. Writing: Students started working on typing their opinion pieces. I instructed them on how to use the button "tab" to indent their paragraphs. They were very excited about typing! They are learning how to format their writing, which can be very tricky when first typing. During work time, if students finished all their work, they started free typing more stories of their own. We also took a short break this week to go out and enjoy the sun! Sometimes we all could use a little extra vitamin d after a long winter and continue to build classroom community! Reminder: Fun Run Money is due May 3rd!
Thanks to all of you who made it to conferences! It was great catching up with each of you. I know 20 minutes goes quick, so if you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out!
Math: We started working on area and perimeter concepts. Students are working to find the area and perimeter of rectangles and squares. Students will need to know how to find the missing side of a rectangle or square, divide a shape up into two different rectangles or squares to find the area, and to be able to find the perimeter. Reading: We have been working on some state test practice. We have been practicing how to read the directions, how to answer specific types of questions, and going back to find evidence in the story. If students notice they are reading a fictional text they are asking themselves four different questions:
These could be great questions to ask your child at home as they are doing their nightly reading. Writing: We started writing our opinion pieces! Each student has come up with their thesis and three reasons to support their thinking. Students need to be able to write an opinion piece including an introduction, 3 reasons (or more), and a conclusion. They are writing on a topic of their choice and learning to support their reasons with evidence and facts. Ask them what they chose! They have been fun to read. Social Studies: Students have been learning about communities and more specifically about the community of Portland. They have learned about how Portland has grown over time. They have been very interested about Portland and have asked some great questions! We are moving in the direction of how a city runs by learning about the different people who help a city run (i.e. mayor). Fun Run was a major success! They all did such a great job running SO many laps! Our class even had the top 2 runners in 3rd grade! Our class name, Road Runners, even holds true to the field! Go us! :) We had a really wonderful week! Our class is representing the third grade in OBOB. Congratulations to the Book Worms for taking first place and to the #1 OBOB Team for taking second place in third grade! Both teams included students from our class. They have done an incredible job! Go Road Runners! REMINDER: Friday is Dress Like A Book Character Math: We finished our third unit on multiplication and division. Students took their assessment on Friday. I will be sending it home for you to see how they did. Please send their assessment back with them to school after viewing how they performed. We will be starting our next unit on fractions! How you can be supporting your child with math: 1. When you come across real life scenarios involving fractions, it would be great if you stopped to share with your child. For example, cooking is a great learning opportunity for your child to see how fractions exist outside the classroom. Literacy: We started our third unit! It focuses on character traits. Students have been reading their book paying close attention to how their character talks, feels, and acts. They are using that information to help determine traits about their character. How you can support with reading: Ask your child about the character in their book and what traits their character has and what in the story made them think that. We are focusing on using textual evidence to support their thinking. Writing: Students are publishing their expository writing pieces! They are turning out to be fantastic. They have worked very hard on these. Any writing pieces that are not completed by Friday will need to be finished at home. Students should work on their piece independently and turn it in as soon as they are finished. We will start our opinion unit next! Social Studies: Students started their final project for our "Sharing The Planet" unit. They are currently researching a region of the United States. They have used multiple resources to gather information on the resources, landforms, climate, and other interesting facts. They will use the information to create something that shows a representation of what they have learned. Some options include a slide show, poster, brochure, writing piece, etc. They have LOVED researching! Stay tuned for their final piece! Our class made posters for the hallway! They turned out so great! What a creative group of students. They made posters to encourage students to be kind, play fair, and to never give up! :) We are cruising right along and there isn't anything too new to report. Students are continuing to work on their non-fiction writing piece while adding important touches like text features and strong introductions and conclusions. We are continuing to solidify our knowledge about multiplication and division. We will begin our new reading unit this week. We will switch back to studying fiction and take an in depth look on characters we are reading about in books.
Odds & Ends: Valentine's Day: Students may bring in Valentines to share with the class. They may decorate something to collect their valentines in but don't need to. Participating in this is also completely optional! Popcorn Friday: Bring your quarters this Friday! Go For The Gold This month, ALL students who turn in their reading log will receive a coupon for a free Pizza Hut personal pizza. Help your student stay on track with logging their hours and submitting the form by the 7th of the month for the previous month. Forms should be turned in to the classroom teacher who will collect them for the volunteer. Hiteon Science Expo- Thursday, March 14th, 2019 from 6:00-8:00 PM That’s right! It’s time to let those scientific minds fly and design an experiment reflecting your curiosity and interests. You can do an experiment, create an invention, or reverse engineer an existing product – your choice! Key dates are:
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Sept. 14th- First Day of Online Learning
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