New Year…New Challenges!

Happy 2018! I hope that you had a wonderful and restful holiday season. This is an exciting time in 3rd grade, as we are ready to tackle new challenges!

In Writer’s Workshop we will finish publishing our personal narratives. The publishing process has given us an opportunity to teach children many different strategies for revising. This is an important skill in 3rd grade, as students learn to look at their drafts with fresh eyes and an awareness of their audience.  We have been using Karen Hesse, Donald Crews, and Jane Yolen as mentor authors and trying to replicate the strategies they use as writers.

Here are some of the revision strategies that students have learned:

• writing a strong lead using action, dialogue or setting
• developing the heart of the story (the most important part)
• adding in the internal story (what is the character thinking, wondering, or imagining)
• adding detail to the part that has a strong emotion
• paragraphing our story

Young writers can be reluctant to revise! Once the pencil leaves the page, many third grade writers consider themselves “done”.  All these revision strategies encourage our writers to write longer, more developed, more polished final pieces of writing.

In Reader’s Workshop we will begin a new unit in which we will be learning how to read informational texts.  Reading nonfiction in third grade will lead to the development of new skills that students need when reading to learn. In second grade, students worked on identifying the central topic, and gathered information related to that topic. Third graders will be working to read to figure out the main idea. Readers will learn to question what the author is trying to teach us in a nonfiction book. They will also learn the important skill of summarizing. This week, students were given a Pre-assessment in which they read a non-fiction article and were asked to summarize the text and include supporting details.  All this work in Reading and Writing workshop will support students’ success on the ELA exams in the Spring.

In Math, we have begun a new investigation based on the context of Muffles Truffles chocolate shop.  We are using this context to support student in developing important ideas in multiplication. We will use this situation as a springboard for students to investigate and use the model of the array. This is a standards-based model that students are expected to use to model multiplication and it’s properties. In class, we use grid paper and square tiles as tools to represent multiplication on the array.

The array model shown below shows a 3×5 array.

The array model also shows the relationship between multiplication, repeated addition, and later, even division!

In the next few weeks, you will see homework coming home expecting your child to use an array model.  As children begin to commit the multiplication facts to memory, the array model will continue to support the conceptual understanding of multiplication and division.

Upcoming Dates and Reminders:

PLEASE SEND TRIP SLIPS AND TRIP MONEY IN ASAP!

January 26th– Trip to the Recycling Center (We will be taking the subway!)- Please sign the Permission Slip AND the Recycling Center Waiver.

February 7th : BAM for “The Magic City” (all trip slips and money were submitted for this back in the Fall)

February 27th: College of Staten Island for the performance- “The Dragon’s Tale”