Class 302: Welcome to the blog!
Dear Families,
Welcome to our class blog! This year we will be using the blog to communicate about anything you should know: our current units of study, upcoming events, and exciting news from the classroom. We hope you find that the blog connects you to our class community.
This week we are continuing to get to know one another and establish our rules and routines. We are having ongoing conversations about attentive listening, which will be a focus throughout the year as our third graders grow and mature. Right now we are working on making eye contact with the speaker and remembering that one person speaks at a time during class discussions. You can support this work at home by using similar norms during family dinners or discussions.
In Writing Workshop, we are just beginning our Personal Narrative unit. This week the kids will spend time listing true story ideas that have some special significance to them– maybe the first time they rode the Wonder Wheel, when they looked for rocks with Grandpa, or the time they lost a favorite item. Later in the week our writers will settle on one idea to make into a story. You can help at home by asking about their ideas. By Wednesday or Thursday, the kids will choose their idea. That would be a good time to check in with your child. For reluctant writers, you can have them rehearse their story out loud with you, which will make the writing process much smoother.
We began our first chapter book read aloud, Stone Fox, by John Reynolds Gardiner. During read aloud time, we stop periodically to work on reading comprehension strategies, including retelling the important parts, describing characters, and making predictions based on what we know so far, what we know about how the characters usually act, and what we know about how stories usually go in general. During independent reading time, we are checking in with kids individually to make sure they are reading just-right books. At home, make sure your children can give you a quick retelling of what happened in the books they are reading. A quick check would be: Who is in the part you just read? Where is your character? What is your character doing? If your child is not bringing their book baggie home each night, please let me know.
In Math, we are setting up our norms and routines by working independently and collaboratively on a variety of logic and computation problems. This week we will focus on a coin investigation, where the process of the work is much more important than just “getting the right answer”. We will talk about the value of working systematically, in an organized manner, and how to communicate our thinking in a way that others can easily understand. The coin homework on Wednesday evening will give you a small taste of what we are doing in class.
Finally, we have a couple of reminders:
- Please remember that candy and sugary or caffeinated drinks are not allowed in school. This includes Gatorade and Snapple products.
- Please remember to send in $8 in an envelope labeled with your child’s name to cover the cost of Scholastic News magazines.
- I will send home Scholastic book catalogs shortly. We can only accept online orders. Our class code is HLFDN.
- If you would like to send in a plant, we would love to house them for the year. If they are still alive and well at the end of the year, we will return them to you.
Thank you for helping us have a great start to the school year!
Ms. Anne