Take Note

Dear Third grade families,

Happy Wednesday!  I was so happy to see your sunny-faced children this morning.

This week, third grade readers and writers will be helping me as I research rainforest frogs.  We are going to write expository essays that connect an animal to its habitat through the lens of animal adaptation.  After they help me, students will choose their own animal and habitat to research.

Today, students learned how to think of key words for research and how to revise their thinking about keywords when they don’t find them in the index or the table of contents.  Then, we learned how to paraphrase and shorten the ideas of the author in order to take notes.  We learned to read, think, jot.  We read and try to understand.  We think, what did that text mean? Then we jot, in our own words, the gist of the text in our notes.

We will be back on the notebook checking schedule next week, starting with group A.  As always, students are expected to write two entries in their notebook this week.

Ideas for the stuck writer:

• Write about a small moment from your break
• Write a descriptive entry about a vehicle or a toy
• Write a list of places you have gone that have changed how you see the world

There is no spelling homework this week, because it is a three day week.  But get ready to get back to the spelling-homework-every-night routine next week.

Poetry share is this Friday.  The two poems were posted to the blog already for two weeks. Students received their hard copies of “April Rain Song” by Langston Hughes today.  I am encouraging students to memorize that poem, mostly because I love it!  “Spring Is” is nice, too.