Week 35: May 8th- May 12th

Reminders/Announcements:

STAAR Testing is this week.  Your child will take the math test on Monday and the reading test on Tuesday.  

By working together, we can make your child’s test experience positive and successful.  Here are some suggestions and reminders to help your child succeed:

-  Make sure your child gets a good night’s rest.

-  Have your child eat a healthy breakfast at home or in the cafeteria at school.

-  Make sure your child arrives at school on time.  We will be starting very soon after the school bell rings.

-  HCE will be providing one, clean snack on Monday and one on Tuesday.  Your child can bring their own snack as well. Let’s avoid bringing snacks that are sticky, liquid-based, and messy (e.g. Cheetos).  We will also be providing a water bottle each day. 

- We highly encourage your child to bring a jacket or sweatshirt.  The AC will be on and it gets rather cold in our class and testing rooms.

- Do not bring a backpack to school.  Your child only needs a jacket and, if you would like, a lunch and/or snack.

- Per TEA, students are not allowed to bring or WEAR devices during testing.  We are asking that your child leave smartwatches, Fitbits, and phones at home on Monday and Tuesday.

- -Continue to build your child’s confidence through the weekend!  Please reiterate that they have learned everything they need to know for the test.  We have practiced strategies to help them be successful test takers.  We are ready and prepared!

Thank you for continued support and help in making Monday and Tuesday test days run smoothly.

Other End of Year Dates: 

• Friday, May 19th: Bike to School Day
• Important -If your child is going to participate in this event after school he or she will need a change of transportation note. 
• Monday, May 22nd:  Publishers Picnic
• Please make plans to join your child in the third grade courtyard from 12:00-12:30.  They will share with you much of their work from this school year.  It's a great time to see the growth they have made this year and celebrate their success.  Because this is a school wide event, you will want to get here early.  
• Tips on things to bring that will make the time more special:  smiles, a blanket or chairs to sit, a lunch with your child's favorite things, and plenty of water as it is to be hot and humid.
• Thursday, May 25th:  3rd grade Chariot Races
• Friday, May 26th:  Winds of Time school-wide parade 

Reading:
Come Wednesday, we will embark on our journey to Rome for HCE's Winds of Time end of year unit.  We will introduce Rome on Wednesday as we compare Ancient Rome to current day Rome.  Students will begin reading about all-things Rome using library and online resources.  We will be developing a class word wall that is comprised of words that are specific to Rome.  Students will jot notes in their notebooks while reading.  This will eventually form an ABCs of Ancient Rome book that each student will make.  

Writing:
We will continue to dive into editing and revising strategies this week.  We are going to focus on ending punctuation of sentences as well as complete vs. fragmented sentences.  Students will practice writing complete sentences by revisiting and editing fragmented sentences in their Writer's Notebooks.  For homework this week, you'll notice we are sending home a capitalization practice.  This will continue to reinforce our grammar practice from last week.

Spelling:
Due to a short week, we will focus on cursive handwriting and grammar practice.

Social Studies:
We are dedicating our social studies block of time towards Winds of Time for the next few weeks to continue our study of Ancient Rome.  This week, we will learn the basics of Ancient Rome.  Be sure to ask your child what a gladiator is and what aqueducts are.  These two things, among many others, were very important in Ancient Rome.

Math: Since this is a short week, we will use are math block to work on keyboarding skills. We will discuss home key positions and work on speed and accuracy. We are encouraging students to start typing always on the home key before typing any word. This can be a difficult change for students who are use to typing with just one finger at a time. 

Science:  In science this week, we will be continuing are discussion on weather and measurement by exploring tools used for studying weather.  We will research these tools and how they assist meteorologist. Your child will also track temperature, wind speed, and humidity in various cities. 

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!
Thank you for offering your children life experiences and a chance to read over the break!

Please make sure to reference the email from Mrs. Ford about upcoming assessments.  We will be giving a NRT assessment and CoGAT over the next two weeks.  Testing will require us to move schedules around, so our blocks of learning will be modified over the next few weeks.  The information below will catch you up on the learning that we will cover from 1/11-1/22.

Language Arts
Reading- We have entered the second C in the CCP process.  Students have consumed (read) many great examples of narrative.  We will spend the next few days reading like critiques to determine if an author uses various craft elements to enhance their story.  The next few days we will look at ways to use dialogue to move a story rather than just using dialogue for the fun of making commas and quotation marks!
Writing- Students will begin using the narrative arc to help them plan out a story before writing. This pre-writing tool is helpful for writer's to use to see if a story is worthy of taking to publication.  If the parts of a narrative aren't clear, it might be a story simply worth remembering but not taking through the writing process to publication.
Spelling-Your children completed a midyear inventory last week in Word Study.  I was so pleased to see how they have progressed in their knowledge of spelling concepts.  We will reorganize ourselves into new spelling groups this week.  New spelling words will come home on 1/13.  Our test will be on 1/20 and an application grade will be taken between 1/21 and 1/26.  Your support at home with spelling concepts is appreciated.

Social Studies
The third 9 weeks brings us to our unit called, Story of America.  You may remember it as history! :)  Last week we discussed the terms; past, present, future, year, decade, century and millennium.  We will use the next few weeks to think about the time and life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Students will work to complete a learning menu.  Activities on the menu will challenge them to think about their dreams for our country, how MLK Jr.'s life and death impacted the way we do things today and ways we can honor those who have made a difference in the history of our country and world.

Math
In math this week, we will continue working on multiplication and division. On Monday, we will play the game kahoot which will review the vocabulary and skills from multiplying and dividing. On Wednesday, we will review for our test on Thursday. We will prepare in class for our test so no review will be sent home. On Thursday we will take our multiplication and division test. Due to testing this week, we will not have a problem of the week. On Monday, your child will come home with an addition and subtraction review worksheet. We will have our normal Mangahigh homework on Tuesday and Wednesday night. We will still have our fast facts quiz on Friday. It will not be a grade this week.

Science
In science this week, we will begin keyboarding. We will spend the three days that we are not testing learning how to keyboard. We will work on the proper keyboarding posture and we will work on using the home row keys. We will spend these days doing lessons and practice building keyboarding skills.