Week of October 30, 2017

Week of October 30th-November 3rd

Students had a wonderful field trip to FRIM and learned a lot about patterns and the different biotic and abiotic elements in that diverse ecosystem. Thanks again to our parent volunteers for helping make it a smooth trip. Click here to view some photos (most of them taken by students and more to come).

On Tuesday, students will be able to dress up in their Halloween costumes (no weapons and no masks). While there will not be any specific parties, students do love to see the different and creative costumes. You may wish to have your child bring in their school uniform to change into as sometimes those costumes are not comfortable to wear all day.

On Thursday, storyteller Tanya Batt will be sharing her ideas, creativity, and storytelling with grade three.

On Friday, nonfiction children’s author Melissa Stewart will do a Skype visit with students, explaining how she writes her books, amongst other things.

Also on Friday, it will be the Deepavali Celebration and Dress Up Day.

This week will begin on Day 2.

Reading Students will take stock of their progress in nonfiction reading so far and set goals for themselves. They will then make plans to help them reach those goals.  Readers will also read and take notes, knowing they will have conversations later.  They will read holding those conversations in their heads.

Writing Students will create a table of contents to help organize and chapter the information they write. When writers revise, they will consider ways they can add more or elaborate.  Information writers can elaborate by studying mentor texts, taking note of all different kinds of information that writers use to teach readers about subtopics.

Math Students will begin to look at different subtraction strategies for three digit numbers. They will be using place value, number lines, and decomposing.

Science Students will look at ecospheres and study what makes them function and survive. They will study food chains and food webs and analyze how biotic elements are interconnected in an ecosystem.

Week of October 24th-27th

Week of October 24th-27th

Students had a short, but productive week last Monday and Tuesday. They spent time tuning in to the different biomes (ecosystems) around the world and figuring out what are some of the common characteristics they all share.

Hopefully you had an enjoying and relaxing holiday. Speaking of holidays, we have had a lot of them recently. But we now enter a long stretch on the calendar with very few disruptions. Which is good, because the students have lots to learn!

This Friday, students will be going on a field trip to FRIM. They will need to bring a home snack, as we will be eating our snack at FRIM. Children also need to bring: sunscreen, water bottle, hat, bug spray/repellent. Please have your child apply sunscreen and bug spray before arriving at school. For those of you who are chaperones, please be at school by 8:00. Parents will ride on the bus with the students. We should arrive back at ISKL around 11:45.

Even though there is no school on Monday if your child has time s/he can complete a response to this week's IMWAYR linked here and on Classroom.

This week will begin on Day 4.

Reading Students will organize the bits of information in a nonfiction text into categories.  They will also teach others what they’ve learned from their nonfiction texts, paying close attention to the main ideas and supporting details.

Writing They will make plans for how to organize their information writing and try different organization structures on for size. Writers look at the different parts of an informational text paragraph, breaking them apart and identifying their purpose. They will write an informational paragraph.

Math Students will continue to practice a variety of addition strategies to find the sum of 3-digit numbers. They will also be solving real world problems involving addition and measurement.

Science Students will look for commonalities among components of biomes in different locations, as well as adaptations that plants and animals make to these different biomes. They will begin to study food chains/food webs to think about the interconnectedness of living and nonliving elements in an ecosystem.

A Note from Ms. Suji

Halloween Costume Ideas

Week of October 16-17th

Week of October 16-17th

Third graders really enjoyed participating in the cardboard challenge last Wednesday. It gave them the opportunity to collaborate, be creative and passionate, have fun, and share their creations with the whole grade.

3EV also was involved in a Mystery Skype! Students successfully identified the location of an international school near Berlin, Germany. They applied many of the mapping skills learned during this unit and really had an opportunity to practice the SLRs as well!  Please click HERE to view photos from both the Cardboard Challenge and other recent events. Ray was our photographer for the Skype, so I still have to get the photos from him to add, so check back next week too.

Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule to attend the conferences. It was a great opportunity for the students to share their work and talk about their learning goals.

This week will begin on Day 2. It will be a short two day week. Please turn in the field trip form by Tuesday. Home learning is also due on Tuesday.

Reading During this shortened week, students will get ready to read nonfiction by revving up their minds even before they start reading a text by previewing it, accessing prior knowledge, identifying the different features and thinking about how the book might go.

Writing Students will create a list of topics that they have a lot of prior knowledge with and feel like experts in. These topics will be used for future nonfiction informational writing. They will then choose one of those topics that they wish to develop further and write about in detail.

Math Students will begin the week by learning and practicing a strategy for adding within 1000, the first being the partial sums strategy.

Science This week marks the beginning of the Ecosystems unit. We will start out by thinking about what an ecosystem is and what are some different ecosystems around the world.

A great connection would be for your third grader to take a few photos over the break, focusing on how water is used or living and nonliving things within an ecosystem.

This week we will also start commenting on blog posts. I will introduce the students to the key words: compliment, connection, comment (being a way to add on to the topic), and question. We will brainstorm ideas for each of these words and strive to write blog comments that use at least three of these points. This may be helpful as you make comments on student blogs too. You can find all the 3EV blogs linked on the right side of the page HERE. It would be great if you could comment on a few student blogs regularly (do not feel you have to limit yourself to just your child). 

Have a safe and relaxing holiday!

Week of October 11th-13th

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, we look forward to seeing you AND your child for conferences! It is a great opportunity for us to have a conversation about your child’s progress thus far and set goals together.

As our narrative writing unit came to an end last week, students had the opportunity to share their stories with a variety of different third grade students, both in their class and in other grade three classes. They enjoyed being able to share, as well as give and receive feedback. Students are encouraged to continue writing personal narrative stories at home and bring them to class to share.

It is not too late to bring in cardboard! We need as much as we can get for our Cardboard Challenge taking place on Wednesday, October 11th.

We are enjoying our Global Read Aloud book choice, Fenway and Hattie and have read chapters 1-3 so far. Look for a link on Google Classroom of teachers reading the chapters in case you would like to listen in as a family.

This week will begin on Day 5.

Reading During this shortened week, we will transition toward information/nonfiction reading, with the first focus being on finding the main ideas of the text and text structures. Students will be accessing their prior knowledge of this genre and tapping into topics of interest.

Writing The informational writing unit will be taught in conjunction with our information reading unit. Although this is not a unit where the focus is on research to write, rather the students will use informational writing strategies as they compose texts about subjects they already know well. This week will give the students the chance to show what they already know about the genre. Students will also begin to develop plans for how to organize their writing.

Math We will continue to use rounding as an estimation strategy by introducing rounding to the nearest 100. Students will continue to show different ways of proving their thinking by using a number line, using benchmark numbers, and finding halfway numbers. As always the parent learning connection has ideas for you in math and reading/writing here.

Social Studies  This week will mark the end of our Mapping and Landforms unit. Students will get an opportunity to share and celebrate the maps that they have created (landform, resource, climate, and population) as well as analyze and ask questions about the maps created by others.

IMWAYR7- students had only a few minutes to record these