Get Ready for February!

February is a short month and probably one of the busiest months of school!  We have a lot of great activities coming next month that we want you and your child know about.  Please check your child's Friday Folder as there is always valuable information!  Here are the highlights of February:

February 5th:  100th Day of School...We will be celebrating with a special snack.  Please send your child in to school with 100 small pieces of food for our  100th day trail mix (ex. cereal, pretzels, chocolate chips, goldfish, marshmallows, raisins, craisins, etc.).

February 8th-12th: The Scholastic Book Fair is returning to SCS this week!  Monday is the preview day so both Deb and Miss Niles' classes will go to the Book Fair to see what's for sale. Then on Tuesday, Februrary 9th, our classes will go back to the Book Fair to make purchases.  Your child does not have to buy anything during this time; however, this is the only "in-school" time we will be encouraging purchases to be made. Feel free to come to the Book Fair with your child to purchase books as well. The Book Fair is open until 8:00pm on Tuesday and Thursday.

February 12th: Valentine's Day Celebration...On Friday, February 12th, we will have a small Valentine's Day Celebration. If your child chooses to make valentines for his or her classmates, please make sure there is one for each child in the class.  We have included a list in your child's Friday Folder.

February 19th:  "Frindle" Companion Workshop with the Flynn Theatre...On Thursday, March 3rd, we are going to see the book Frindle brought to life on stage at the Flynn.  We were lucky enough to get a grant to have a teacher from the Flynn come to our class on February 19th to do a workshop to get ourselves ready for the performance.

February 20-29th: Winter Vacation...School resumes on Tuesday, March 1st.

In math, we continued to work with measurement, including volume, time, length, and mass.  We worked with measurement tools to find different objects in the room to measure. Measuring volume was definitely messy....water everywhere!  We also spent time solving multi-step story problems related to measuring. Next week, our focus turns to more work with fractions.

We continued to work on our persuasive speeches in Writer's Workshop. This week we worked on gathering all we know about our topics.  The children listed everything they know about their topics and worked to organize those ideas into categories.  They then started to write their paragraphs from these lists.  Have you asked your child about his or her persuasive speech topic?

We also finished learning all of the cursive letters this week!  We made it!  Now we are working on cursive connectives. This means we are working on connecting letters together to spell words.  Encourage your child to practice writing his or her name in cursive at home!

Miss Niles' class finally finished reading the Red Clover Books this week.  After completing a variety of literacy projects for each book, a winner was chosen in their room.  Elizabeth: Queen of the Seas was Miss Niles' class favorite followed by a tie between Shh! We Have a Plan and Blizzard. Be sure to ask your child about his or her vote!

Have a great weekend!

Measurement, Mass and the Metric System!

Esprit Third Grade has spent this past week measuring a variety of things during our math time.  We practiced telling time and learned how to use a number line to measure time.  We learned about the metric system and customary measurement.  We also practiced estimating liquid volume and mass with a focus on the metric system of measurement in grams and milliliters. Next week we will continue our measurement unit and will learn more about measuring volume and measurement story problems.

We spent this week reading the last of the Red Clover books.  This year's selection was quite diverse and included two poetry books.  Miss Deb's class chose Elizabeth Queen of the Sea by Lynne Cox as their favorite.  Shh! We have a Plan by Chris Haughton was a close second!  Miss Niles' class still has two books to read and will be voting at the end of the week.  Can't to see what they choose as a favorite! During the month of February we will begin a character study unit during our Reader's Workshop time.

We are continuing our work with persuasive speeches during Writer's Workshop.  This week we focused on editing and set goals for our writing.  Our plan is to keep our goals in mind and practice our goals when we are writing.  We also learned how to use an Opinion Writing Checklist to improve our speeches.  Focusing on goals and using a checklist will help us become stronger writers.  Many of the goals revolved around elaborating and adding details to our speeches to make them more persuasive and using punctuation consistently!

We have learned how to form almost every letter in the alphabet in cursive already!  Next week we will finish up learning about letter formation and will then start writing words in cursive.   We will continue to practice writing and reading cursive throughout the remainder of the school year.

This week every class at SCS enjoyed a Jeh Kulu workshop during their Physical Education time. Students had a terrific time learning African dance and then had the chance to perform during a school assembly in the afternoon. Can your child show you any of the dance moves they learned from Jeh Kulu?

Jeh Kulu African Drummers and Dancers

This week we had some visitors to SCS from the group Jeh Kulu. They are an African Dance and Drumming group from Burlington.  On Friday, we were treated to a great performance by the drummers.  It was hard to keep from dancing to the beat!  All next week Jeh Kulu will be in the children's P.E. classes teaching them African Dancing and then next Friday we will have a final performance by Jeh Kulu.  It should be a fun week filled with lots of music and dance!  Here is a link if you want to see the type of work Jeh Kulu does with schools...  Jeh Kulu Artists in Residence

We also had Hands on Nature this week.  This month's theme was air.  Through an entertaining play and engaging experiments, we learned about the importance of air to everything on our planet and discovered the properties of air.  Ask your child about the experiments we did! What did he or she learn about air? Thanks to our great Hands on Nature volunteers!

In writing, we continue to work on our persuasive speeches about concerns we have in our school and about noteworthy people in our school.  This week's focus was on thinking about your audience and finding ways to bring your listeners along and directly address their thoughts on your topic.   For example, a child may add one of the following sentence starters to get the audience more involved in the speech:

• "Maybe you are wondering..."
• "Let me tell you..."
• "Have you ever..."
• "What about..."

Be sure to ask your child about his or her persuasive speech drafts this week. Who did he or she write about? Who is a noteworthy person at SCS to your child?

In math, we began a new unit on measurement.  This week most of our work involved telling time to the minute on an analog clock.  Some students found this to be a bit tricky...so if you happen to have an analog clock at home (not a digital clock), you could practice telling time with your child.  We also learned about elapsed time and solved word problems that involved figuring out how long something took to be completed.

Please note that Report Cards will be coming home on Friday, January 29th.  Our next parent conference will be happening in March.  We will let you know when our schedules are ready for you to sign up.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  Esprit Third Grade has welcomed the year 2016 with some new and different learning experiences.  We are all settling back into school routines and happy to be working together again.

We began our first week back learning about cursive handwriting.  We have been talking about good posture when writing, pencil grip and letter formation.  This week we practiced forming L, E, H, B and F.  Next week we will learn how to form letters K, I, J, P and R.  In a few weeks we will have learned enough letters to start writing in cursive for some of our work here in school.

This month our team will be reading the 2015-2016 Red Clover books nominees.  Red Clover books are books that have been nominated by the Vermont Department of Libraries for Vermont's Picture Book Award for grades K-4.  Each year thousands of Vermont school children read the 10 nominated picture books and vote for their favorite.  The award has been handed out annually since 1997.  You can check out the nominees by clicking on this link 2015-2016 Red Clover Books .  Be sure to ask your child about the books he or she heard this week and about the activities that accompanied the books.

We also began a new writing unit this week.  For the next two months we will be writing persuasive speeches, petitions and editorials.  We have begun this unit with a focus on our school community. This week we learned that speech writing is a kind of opinion writing through which the writer puts forth a thesis statement and then gives reasons, details and examples that support his or her opinion.  We learned that writers of persuasive speeches come up with their ideas by seeing problems and imagining solutions. Writers change the world not just by looking at what's broken, but also by looking at what's beautiful.  They get others to pay attention to people, places, things, or ideas that they might otherwise walk right past.  We will continue with this work for the next couple of months.  What did your child write about this week? What change does he or she want to see in our school community?  A few ideas that were written about were changes to the lunch menu, longer recess, longer lunch, bigger cubbies for 3rd graders, and having more school assemblies.

This week students were introduced to the standard algorithms for both addition and subtraction in math.  We have spent the week reinforcing and practicing these somewhat tricky algorithms. Along with learning the traditional way to add and subtract numbers the students also modeled their thinking with base ten pieces.  This visual model helped them to see what was really happening when they were regrouping.  Next week we will begin a new unit with a focus on measurement and fractions.  We will begin this unit learning how to measure both time and mass, and will then move on to volume.  Students will then be expected to use their learning to solve story problems involving time, mass and volume.

On Monday we will have our Literary Lunch for those students who turned in their December reading logs and met the 500 minute requirement.  Please strongly encourage your child to keep track of his/her reading time.  It is the expectation that all students will read at least 500 minutes each month.
Have a terrific weekend!