Week 3: September 5-9

Reminders:

• Lunch with Heroes is on Friday, September 9th.  Wear red, white, and blue to celebrate eating lunch with our heroic community members!  We invite all heroes to Friday's lunch - military, police, fire department and more! Have a connection with one of these heroes?  Be sure to bring them to HCE to eat lunch with our third graders from 12:00-12:30. 
• Curriculum Night is September 15th. Third grade time slot is from 6:35-7:15. This is following the PTA meeting from 5:50-6:30.
• BEFORE Curriculum Night, please take 10 minutes and watch our third grade video (Will be linked and sent out shortly!).  Information in this video will help you know about the content we will cover this year with your child.  Our meeting on the 15th of September will include: a short and fun quiz on the content in the video, classroom expectations, classroom management, communication, and homework.  We know you are busy and have worked hard to create this video and streamline our presentation in person to get you the best information in the most concise fashion.

Reading - We will learn how to preview a text this week in Reader's Workshop. It is important for young readers, when learning how to pick a good book to read, to know the process of previewing a book.  This will help them determine if the book fits their purpose, interest, and ability.  Students have been sticky note crazy!  We've introduced your child to tracking their thinking while reading using sticky notes and symbols. They have enjoyed this new found way to leave their thinking in their books. This week we will help them learn how to use their notes to create reader's response journal entries in their Reader's Notebooks.  Your child's language arts teacher will continue to administer DRA assessments.

Writing- We will begin our week continuing to brainstorm ideas for writing stories from our interests, memories, and experiences.  We look forward to hearing more stories from our students while utilizing focused storytelling with one another.  We will transfer brainstorming and storytelling into our notebook as we reflect on the question "What do writer's do?"  We will wrap up the week with students creating writing goals for this 9 week period.  

Word Work- This week we will introduce students to a variety of ways that we will attack word work in our classrooms.  They will have a GENERIC list of spelling words.  We WILL NOT be taking a REAL test with these words.  Our words will stay in the classroom and be used to help us understand and practice some components of word study.  

Social Studies- Wow!  What wonderful classroom communities we have built the last two weeks!  We are excited to use our social studies resource this week, Studies Weekly Newspaper.  We will read week 1 of our newspaper and discover how thoughtful citizens of our world have made lasting contributions to our society. 

Math: This week in math, we will be working place value. We will be looking at placing number on number lines as a strategy of comparing numbers. We are then veturing into studying five digit and six digit numbers. When looking at five digit and six digit numbers we will look at the different forms to represent the number through word form, expanded, standard form, and with number lines. 

Also we use place value to compare numbers. We discussed last week about starting with the largest place value when comparing two or more numbers. 

Some vocabulary we are working on is place, value, greater than, less than, compare, ten- thousands place, hundred thousands place. 

   

Science:   In science this week, we will be exploring our observation skills as part are work in the scientific method that will get us prepared for conducting experiments. We will discuss and apply observation skills with our senses and how that will be used as data for experiments. At the end of the week, we will have our first science experiment and go through the scientific method. 

LA/SS 4/26-5/6

REMINDERS- WITS Anthology Celebration is Wednesday, May4.  Mrs. Duncan’s homeroom class will celebrate and share from 10-11am in Mrs. Ford’s Classroom.  Mrs. Ford’s homeroom class will celebrate and share from 1-2p.m. in Mrs. Ford’s Classroom.  Parents and family members are welcome to join us for an exciting hour of readings, reflections and fun.  If you would like to contribute to our “THANK YOU” gift to our WITS instructor, Carolyn Bolton, please send $1.00 with your child to school by Friday, April 29.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Reading- This week we will wrap up our review of poetry.  Next week, students will work through a synthesizing menu to apply the reading skills and strategies we have learned this year.  Readers synthesize when they take information they know, strategies that support their reading and actively monitor and change their thinking while reading.

Writing- Students have done a terrific job of finishing up our criteria charts for a story from our life.  This week I will model the steps a writer goes through when trying to create an INCREDIBLE story from my life.  As I model, students will have a chance to reflect and respond to my choices in hopes to help them make great choices when they launch their own story.  Next week, students will begin the writing process and proceed at the pace that works best for them.  I can’t wait to hear and read some excellent stories!

Word Work- New words will come home 4/27.  A spelling test will be given on 5/4.  An application grade of those words will be taken 5/4-5/11.

SOCIAL STUDIES

If you haven’t caught an episode of ABC’s Shark Tank, I hope you will.  Below you will find a short clip of some of the most famous Shark Tank Jr. competitors.  Students will work in group over the next two weeks to complete and compete in a Shark Tank Jr. Challenge.  Today they met in their groups to start thinking about problems kids face and how they might offer and create a creative solution that could turn into a business opportunity!

MATH
In math this week, we will continue to review all of our math concepts from the entire school year. We will spend a day reviewing addition, subtraction, place value, and estimation. On Wednesday, we will review the different types of graphs we have learned this year. On Thursday and Friday, we will do a review circuit. We will have a POTW due on Friday and a Fast Facts quiz on Friday. The homework this week is all review. Your child will have 3-4 problems each night. Please make sure your child is doing their homework so they are getting extra review before STAAR next Monday.

SCIENCE
During our science time this week, we will review mass, weight, and capacity. These concepts are used in science and math. We will also practice using a ruler as we prepare for the Math STAAR.

Week of 9/28-10/2

NEWS: Check out the new page on the side of the BLOG called COUGAR PAW PRIDE. We will use this space to keep you updated on the AMAZING ways the students in our classes are making a difference in our classrooms and around campus!

Open House will be on Tuesday, September 29.  Classrooms are open for visiting from 5:30-6:30p.m.  At 6:40 the first PTA meeting for the school year will be held in the cafeteria.  Coach Thompson and Teaching Aides will be available in the gym to watch children as parents attend the meeting.  

Thank you to our HCE PTA for funding WITS for third grade for the second year. (Now grades 3-5 will have the opportunity to participate in this program.)  Writers In the Schools is a program that sends professional writer's to schools to work with both teachers and students in creative writing.  Our writer this school year is Carolyn Bolton.  I am very excited, as she was teamed with third grade last school year and not only did the kids learn much from her writing experience, but I did as well.  She will be with us most weeks on Wednesdays. For this week, Mrs. Bolton will join us on Tuesday.

Please be on the look out for more information about WITS and Mrs. Bolton in the TUESDAY NEWSDAY folders. There will be a permission slip in the folder that we will need you to sign and return so that we may share your children's writing and images with the world around us!

READING & WRITING: We will combine our work in Reading and Writing Workshop this week.  First students will reflect and review expectations for BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER reading.  These will help students direct their focus as we move out of reading assessments and move into small group work.  While students read independently this week, I will pull small groups of students to work on a variety of reading strategies and skills in small group.

GENRE STUDY:  Last week, we started digging into our work on genre studies.  We started by talking about and reading examples from the genre of fantasy.  This week, we will hone in on what makes a story a folktale.  Folk tales are a traditional form of literature that feature ordinary people (folk).These stories are narrative in structure and are often passed down over many years in both an oral and written tradition.  Folktales often have a more obvious theme (lesson or message) for readers.  We will discuss what it is that we believe the author is trying to teach or tell us with this story.  While this is an easy thing for most experienced readers to do, most third graders are just becoming fluent enough readers to think about the BIG picture (theme) while reading.

As students work with folktales this week, they will continue to track their thinking using symbols and sticky notes. These tracks in our text allow us to notice how an author is engaging his or her audience.  We will eventually apply these findings to our own craft of writing.

WORD WORK: Students will continue to learn a variety of word work strategies, practices and games with our practice words as we get ready to LAUNCH our word work.  Wednesday, October 7 will be the first time your student is pulled in his or her differentiated spelling group.  Please let me know if you would like me to send home a word study menu and an extra copy of words for you to practice with your child at home.  Remember, spelling homework is not a requirement this year, as we will incorporate 15-20 minutes of word work into our language arts block each day this year.

SOCIAL STUDIES: We are continuing our 9 weeks focus on Communities, Citizenship and Government.  Last week, we went through the voting process and now we have elected 2 Leadership Council Representatives!  Congratulations to Ben in Mrs. Duncan’s class and Michael in Mrs. Ford's class!  This week, we will focus on government leaders.  Students need to understand who the leaders are at each level of government: local/mayor, state/governor and nation or federal/president.

Week of September 21

LAST WEEK- We had a guest reader from the Houston Bar Association to help us celebrate Constitution Day.  She read So, You Want to Be President to our third grade classes.  They were engaged and asked many questions about how she uses laws to do her job every day.

READING

We will finish up our work on connections early this week.  Last week, we reviewed and practiced making text to self and text to text connections.  This week we will finish by discussing text to world connections.  This type of reading connection can be the most challenging for 3rd graders since it requires an extensive background knowledge of world events and history.  I will scaffold our learning by connecting our text to Ruby Bridges, a story we learned about a few weeks ago in Social Studies.

We will then switch our reading focus to learn more about the genre of fantasy. Reviewing characteristics of a fantasy and sharing aloud a few quality examples will help us understand how this genre is different from the realistic fiction and historical fiction we have been reading.

Students need to continue to read for 20 minutes each night and record the title in their planner.  This is part of their study habits and daily routine which are assessed and reported on the progress report each grading cycle.

WRITING

We are learning how to have an academic discussion in writing.  Last week we talked about ways to get a conversation going, inviting others to the discussion and how to ask others for clarification.  This week we will focus on bringing our background knowledge to the discussion, how to mark of piggy-back on someone's comment, and expand someones thought or contribution.  As we work in reading this week, we will consume great examples of fiction stories so that your child will be ready next week to try writing his or her own imaginative stories.

Word Work- We will use Words Their Way this year in third grade.  This week, students will learn a variety of word work activities that they will eventually complete on their own in during our daily work work class time.  For now, students are using a generic list of words to practice.  After two week of practicing routines, your child will be groups according to their Elementary Spelling Inventory results and will receive words that should match their developmental understanding of how words and spelling patterns work.

SOCIAL STUDIES

This week we will learn about HCE's Leadership Council.  Students will have a chance to notice and nominate classmates whom demonstrate the COUGAR CODE.  We will total those nominations and then elect a representative for our homeroom class.  We will use this real world example to guide our study and learning about voting.  This week we will also explore the online portion of our new Social Studies Materials.  Students will learn in class how they can access it online and learn more to earn points with Revere the rat.  They can cash in their points to decorate Revere's habitat!  This is a great resource for extended learning and previewing upcoming at home.

MATH
This week in math, we will continue working with addition. Last week, we finished our unit with place value and started our addition unit. We spent last week practicing our addition without regrouping. This week, we will spend Monday and Tuesday regrouping in the hundreds place. On Wednesday and Thursday, we will move into regrouping in the ones, tens, and hundreds. On Friday, we will have a problem solving day where we are working on word problems. Your child will  learn to decode word problem and pull out key words that help them know what operation (addition or subtraction) that they will use to solve it. For homework this week, your child will come home with an addition worksheet on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. On Monday, the third grade teachers will be introducing the Problem of the Week. This is a higher level thinking word problem that is sent home every Monday and will be due on Friday. We ask that parents and students team up on this question and spend time solving it together. This is not a grade. For Fast Facts this week, we will be moving into subtraction. I have been very impressed by the addition facts and I can tell that the students are spending time every night studying their facts. 

SCIENCE
During our science time this week we will spend time discussing density and move into matter. In our study of density, we will be experimenting with objects and deciding how density affects whether an object will sink or float. 

On Tuesday and Wednesday we will complete a lab on matter. We will have six stations that help us explore the properties of matter including mass, texture, temperature, magnetism, and buoyancy. 

During our science time over the last three weeks, we have been learning about ways to be a good Digital Citizen. We will complete our last digital citizenship lesson on Thursday. As our final lesson, we will make a pledge to always be responsible while using computers and mobile devices. 

As a reminder, the third graders will have their first field trip on Friday, September 25th. Please have your child wear a GREEN shirt on Friday. We will be back for lunch so your child does NOT need a sack lunch to take with them. 

Have a great week!

Love, 

     Mrs. Duncan and Mrs. Ford