November 3, 2013

We had a fun week celebrating Halloween! This week, we will have another half day on Tuesday, November 5th. Dismissal will be at 12:10 this time. There is no school on Monday, November 11th in honor of Veteran's Day. We will be making cards for veterans on Friday and will have a school-wide Veteran's Day assembly.

Reading
We have started our second reading unit, Characters. We will look at characters on a deeper level in third grade. We will focus on character motivation and change and students will be asked to put themselves in the character's shoes. They did a great job on this last week! They imagined what they would do in a character's place and wrote a letter to a character. We finished Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and the class LOVED it! We started a new read aloud, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Toulane.

Writing
We finished our last drafts of the first personal narratives and will start another personal narrative this week. We are focusing on"small moments" and writing like a storyteller, not a reporter. Students have been writing in writer's notebooks to gather more ideas for their writing pieces. Students will do a self reflection of their journals on Friday and I will collect them for my own assessment on Friday.

Math
We will finish Unit 3, Addition and Subtraction, this week. We will review on Wednesday and will have a test on Thursday. A review/practice test will come home on Wednesday night. Please go over this with your child. Our next unit is Multiplication. The students are very excited about learning multiplication! We will start with the 0, 1, 2, 5, and 10 since they essentially know these from skip counting.

Science/Social Studies
We are continuing the planting unit in Science and the geography unit in Social Studies.

Homework:
Math- Monday reteach 3-9; Tuesday reteach 3-10; Wednesday review for test; Thursday/Friday none
Reading-Read 20 minutes each night and record on new November calendar
Writing-Tuesday and Thursday-one page entry on anything (small moments!)
Spelling-Look, Say, Name, Cover, Write,Check each night; practice test on Thursday