Saturday, January 4, 2014

Welcome Back!

It was a wonderful, rest-filled break for my family.  I hope your family enjoyed the break in routine and created many memories!  
We will be back in our school routine starting TUESDAY, JANUARY 7th.  Please make sure that your student starts to get back in his or her school-time nightly routine over the next few days to help our transition.  
Below is what we have coming up in our classroom over the next week.  Second semester of third grade is a big STEP.  We go from strolling to power-walking through our thinking while we read.  

LANGUAGE ARTS
Spelling
We WILL NOT have any spelling this week.  It is a short week and we have a special visitor coming into our classroom to work with us in writing.

Reading

Students will review how to infer in our fiction reading at the beginning of the week.  Inferring is something we do ALL the time.  
In third grade, we use a helpful equation to infer.  BK+TC=I.  This means that our background knowledge, plus text clues help us make an inference about characters, settings and events in the stories we read.  Some sentence stems we use to help us organize our thinking are:
I see (or I read) ________________________.  I know ____________________.  So, I can infer_______________________.
We infer all sorts of things when we read and in our daily life like: setting, weather, time of day, time of year, character feelings, purpose, and mood to just name a few.
As the week progresses, we will begin to infer using non-fiction texts.
Writing
Mrs. Jenny Holter will be working in our classroom and with your students over the next few weeks.  She is helping us work through a new genre of writing, expository.  She will be in our classroom twice this week to teach a whole group lesson and then help us with small group instruction(literacy stations).  Jenny is an experienced SBISD teacher and lover of great writing.  I have enjoyed getting to know her and working with her.  I know your student will enjoy learning from her and working with her also.

SOCIAL STUDIES
STORY OF AMERICA
We will begin a new unit of study in Social Studies.  (This is by far my personal favorite!)  Over the next 9 weeks, students will learn about pieces of American history through the lives of famous American's who made or continue to make a lasting contribution to our country.  To help students understand the wide range of time our nation's history covers, we will start the unit this week learning about time lines.  
Vocabulary that you can discuss at home: time line, year, decade, century, past, present, future, and chronological order

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