Week 15: December 4-8

REMINDERS:

This week and next, we are wrapping up grades for this nine weeks. Report cards are going home soon. Thank you so much for making every effort to have your child in school all day, every day! 

12/5  Toys For Tots and our local fire station will collect new and unwrapped toys the morning of December 5. Students will deliver donations with their class to the hardtop where Santa and the fire truck will be stationed.

12/6  All six classes of third graders will join together for one big Grade Level Photo on Wednesday at 9:00. This is separate from the class pictures that will be taken in the Spring.

12/8  HCE Spelling Bee is scheduled for Friday morning, December 8 in the cafeteria. We wish our third grade classroom winners good luck as they compete against winners from 4th and 5th grade classes.

12/12  Students will have an Energy Assessment next Tuesday. They have had a set of vocabulary cards and a study guide for a week now. Please help your child study for this upcoming test.

12/15  Classroom Parties and Noon Dismissal for winter break

1/9  STAARY STAARY NIGHT  Third grade will host a STAAR information session Tuesday evening, January 9, to familiarize parents with our May state testing  and answer any questions. We will meet in the library form 6:00 to 7:00.

HCE Dads' Club is recruiting new members.  They do several projects to support the students and teachers at HCE. If you are interested in how to join and when they meet, email warrensloan@allstate.com.

Parents are graciously volunteering for lunch duty the week before winter break. If you are interested in joining in, here is the link for sighing up.        http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0e4faaa822a13-teacher 

READING:Third graders will be practicing synthesizing text when responding to a short story. The process of synthesizing occurs when different ideas about a text lead to new thinking. We compare it to baking a cake. Every ingredient separately is important to the cake batter and the frosting, however when combined together something new and different is the result. The teachers will model this process, allow the students to work in collaborative groups, and then in small guided groups to refine the skill. Short stories from Cynthia Rylant's The Children of Christmas will be highlighted during this week's study.


WRITING: As our children are coming to the final stages of publishing their self-selected pieces, they are becoming more aware of the importance of the revision process and how it is about the quality of their changes as opposed to the quantity. For example, instead of saying, My family likes to play board games, it is much more powerful to say, My family loves board games; our favorite is Monopoly. Third graders will be coming together to celebrate the completed final drafts in groups. We will end the week with "Fantasy Friday" writing. Our passionate authors have a special appreciation for fantasy writing, and it is something they truly look forward to composing and sharing.

WORD WORK: As students perfect spelling skills, it is important to encourage them to use independent strategies while writing. Instead of spelling words for our children, we need to respond by having them write the word the way they have seen it in text on a Post It Note or piece of paper. Guiding questions such as, Does that word look correct? or Did you spell it  a syllable at a time? help facilitate confidence and independence.

SOCIAL STUDIES: We will continue our focus this week learning about the many different Cultural Celebrations that Texans observe.  Students will complete their 2nd 9 weeks Social Studies Project by choosing the celebration that they find most interesting and planning an imaginary event to honor the occasion.  We will end the week with a quiz on Winter Holidays. Remember that Social Studies Weekly is always available to students at home.  Log in information can be found in your students green binder.  Information can also be found in the Social Studies Website Resources on the right hand side of the blog. We will finish off the week by completing a Brain Pop quiz on Winter Holidays.

MATH: We continue our study of 2D shapes this week, specifically polygons which must be flat, have straight sides, and are closed. Polygons are named by the number of sides they have and there are several quadrilaterals, or 4 sided polygons, that students must remember. They include square, rhombus, rectangle, trapezoid, parallelogram. We will use vocabulary such as parallel sides, right angles and vertices (vertex) to distinguish one from the other.

 

The list of required polygons also includes triangle, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, nonagon, and decagon.

Students will have a short quiz on Friday on these shapes. They have cards and class notes to study. As usual, there is written Math homework on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. Their Fast Fact Friday (FFF) quiz is on Friday. 

SCIENCE:  We are in full swing with our Science unit on Energy. We have already learned about Mechanical, Thermal, and Light energies and are currently focusing on Sound. Sound is vibrating matter and oddly enough, sound travels best through a solid, then a liquid and worst through a gas. All of this is because of the molecules of each state. Vibrations can spread easily through a solid's close molecules but not so easily through a gas with molecules spread far apart. This week we will spend two days on a hands on lab about all four kinds of energy. Students will work with tuning forks, reflecting light, wind up cars, and lots more. Thank you to parents who have donated Amazon cards so we could restock our Energy lab supplies. On Monday of next week, we will review for our final assessment Tuesday on all four energies. We hope everyone has been reviewing the vocabulary cards and study guide that was sent home last Monday.