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!