Mix It Up!

This week we had "Mix-It Up" with our Middle School Gym.  Miss Niles' class did relay races in the gym and Miss Deb's class colored Mandalas together.  This was a great opportunity to build community across our school building.

We have started reading Dyamonde Daniel as part of of character study unit.  We will spend the next couple weeks reading this story and comparing and contrasting Opal from Because of Winn Dixie with Dyamonde from this story.  There are many interesting similarities and differences between these two characters.
During Writer's Workshop, we continue to work on our adapted fairy tales.  We are finishing up and editing our first pieces of writing and will begin a second piece very soon.  Eventually, we will be writing our own original fairy tales.

During the next week we will be finishing up our unit about multiplication and division with some learning about area and perimeter.  The following week we will begin a new unit that will focus on geometry.  We will be learning more about area, quadrilaterals and polygons.  That unit will continue through the month of April.
We really enjoyed meeting with all of our families for parent teacher conferences.  We appreciated the opportunity to celebrate all our students' growth and successes in third grade thus far this year.
Have a great weekend!

Fairy Tales, Water Cycle, Winn Dixie and more!

This week we continued drafting our fairy tale adaptations.  We are working hard to include lifelike details and create scenes that are like small moment stories. Prior to writing, we began by drawing and acting out the scenes which helped add detail to our writing and create organization in our writing.  Our goal is to bring both our characters and the place in our fairy tales to life.


In Reader's Workshop we will be analyzing author's craft.  We will also begin comparing and contrasting characters to find similarities and differences.  We will do this by reflecting on the books we have read both together and in our book groups.  This will convey to students that they now have a deeper understanding of synthesis - of how a story unfolds, with its parts connecting in particular ways, and the knowledge to think and talk analytically about story structure and author's craft. We finished reading Because of Winn Dixie this week and had a chance to talk about the lessons learned from the book.  It was impressive to hear 3rd Graders really pull out some the bigger themes and ideas of the story!  We made "bumper stickers" with the important lessons and posted those, along with illustrations, on our team bulletin board.  Next Thursday, we will watch the movie Because of Winn Dixie and compare it to the book.

We spent more time solving multiplication and division problems using a variety of strategies.    Next week we will investigate two different interpretations of division - grouping and sharing.  Toward the end of the week we will explore area in greater depth.

This month's Hands On Nature Lesson taught us about the water cycle.  We listened to a puppet show and did some water experiments that investigated the properties of water.  Many thanks to our Hands On Nature parents for providing this awesome learning experience for us!

We have spent some time during the past couple weeks learning about the SBAC test that we will be taking in May.  We have logged on to computers and explored practice test in both Math and Literacy. We will continue to practice periodically until May so all students can become comfortable with the structure of the test.
Have a nice weekend!

Fairy Tale Fun!

This week during Writer's Workshop, we have been immersed in the world of fairy tales.  Our goal by the end of this narrative unit is to have written an adaptation of a fairy tale and an original fairy tale.  To get our selves ready to write, we have been reading original versions of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Three Billy Goats Gruff and many adaptations of these classic tales.  This week we focused on identifying the  kinds of changes authors make when they adapt a fairy tale and the reasoning behind it.  We found that many authors either change the characters, change the events of the story, or the character's motivation. Next week, your child will choose to write an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood or of Three Billy Goats Gruff.  Which will your child choose?

In Reader's Workshop, we are continuing our book club groups and investigating characters.  As the children read their books this week, they were looking to see how their characters react to problems in the book and looking at what their reaction tells us about them as a character.  We did this activity first with our read aloud, Because of Winn Dixie. We observed that Opal, the main character, has had a lot of challenges so far in the book.  Here mom is gone; she is new in town; she does not have any friends; and some boys tease her.  We noticed from her reactions that she is a strong character with a lot of courage!  What has your child learned about the character is her or her book club book?  We also began to study the secondary characters in a story and are looking at how those characters help the main character in the book.

Multiplication and division are still are main focus in math this month; however, this week we focused on solving story problems using multiplication and division. The children worked on these grouping and sharing problems independently in their math journals and then we discussed their variety of strategies, with an emphasis on building an array and identifying its dimensions. For example, one problem was "Rosa bought 32 marbles at the game shop. The marbles came in bags of 8.  How many bags of marbles did she buy?". Ask your child how he or she solved that problem.  Can he or she model it with a labeled array?

Lastly, the weather has been warmer this week, but I am sure it will still fluctuate as we are only in the beginning of March. Please make sure that your child comes to school with appropriate outdoor clothing every day.  Boots are a must as the playground has become extremely muddy with this warmer weather.  Thank you!

Welcome Back!

It was great to be back and see all our third grade friends!  Although we had a choppy week with that "ice day" in the middle, we were able to get back into our routines.

On Thursday, we celebrated Read Across America Day with an assembly.  All the teachers in the school read aloud What Pet Should I Get? by Dr. Seuss and we had the chance to see everyone's "Wild About Reading" hats and costumes! Throughout the day we had several guest readers too!  After the assembly, we hurried off to the Flynn Theatre to see Frindle on stage.  The children seemed to enjoy the show (there were many laughs) and were a great audience!

In Reader's Workshop, we continued to study characters and noticed that although characters are unique, they all progress along the same kind of path in a story.  We can expect that a character will face a problem that gets bigger and bigger, reaches a turning point, and then is resolved.  We used a story mountain to chart these actions/problems/feelings of our characters.  We also began book clubs this week. Each child is in a small group of four peers and they are reading the same book.  Book groups will be reading daily and meeting daily to discuss characters and character development in their books.  Be sure to ask your child which book he or she is reading in book club!

Please note that there is no school on March 25th. That is a parent conference day. If you have not signed up for a parent conference, please visit our google site and do so.  Thank you!