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!

Happy Holidays!

We have had a busy week and half on Team Esprit!  We've been learning a lot and having  lot of fun with our varied activities!

We began the week with our last visits from Susannah, our Flynn Theater teacher.  She chose one the Red Clover picture books called Lindbergh: The Flying Mouse and helped us bring it to life through movement and sound effects.  This is a story about a mouse who needs to get away all the troubles and mouse traps in Germany and he decides to create a flying machine to fly to America.  After many attempts, he finally makes it!  It is a great story of perseverance!  With Susannah, we made a sound track with sound effects to go along with a bad dream that Lindbergh might have had prior to his flight.  The sound effects included cats meowing, owls screeching, and traps snapping.  It was quite a production!  The next day we acted out Lindbergh's flight.  It was fun to watch the children's interpretations of the story and his flight.

During science, we finished our weather unit with an engineering project.  We challenged our students to create a structure that could withstand hurricane force winds. The structure had to have four walls, 2 windows and a door.  The materials they could use were index cards, pattern blocks, tape, string, plastic wrap, and popsicle sticks.  In partnerships, the children first created a design plan for their structure and had to submit a list of materials.  Then we tested it out using our hurricane winds (a leaf blower!)!  Be sure to ask your child about his or her structure.  Did it stand up to the wind?  What allowed it to stay standing?  How could have his or her design be improved?

We are so glad that so many of you could attend our Publishing Party and admire our hard work with our nonfiction books.  After two months of work writing, re-writing, illustrating, editing, and revising, we were happy to finally have an audience. We hope you enjoy our books and learned a lot! Next up, we will be writing opinion speeches about something we want to change here at school or in the world!

Lastly, we spent some time crafting and wrapping gifts!  We hope you enjoy the two small gifts your child is bringing home. Wishing you and your family a wonderful holiday season!  Please note school resumes on January 4th. Here's to a healthy and happy new year for us all!  Happy 2016!

What's the Weather?

We certainly haven't had typical December weather recently!  However, please make sure your child comes to school each day with appropriate clothing to wear outside during our outdoor recess.  Speaking of weather, WPTZ News Channel 5's Chief Meteorologist visited the third graders at SCS on Tuesday.  He talked to us about how he decided to become a meteorologist and gave us inside tips on how he forecasts the weather each day.  We even got to see a video about how the "green screen" works!  Be sure to ask your child about his weather forecasting secret with the green screen!  We also had a chance to ask him several questions and most of questions focused around when it might snow.  He said it won't be any time soon!  Did you happen to see us on the news Tuesday night?  Here's a link to a video Tom Messner posted on Twitter...  Tom Messner Visit



We continued with our weather study with a project related to climate. Last week we studied five different climates: mountain highlands, polar, temperate, tropical, and continental.  In a group of four, the children read articles about each of these climates and recorded some important facts about and characteristics of each of the climates.  This week they used their background knowledge of to create a paper doll with clothes and items that would fit in a suitcase for a trip to this climate.  Be sure to ask your child which climate he or she was "sending" the paper doll to!  What did your child pack?

This week our school participated in the Hour of Code.   The Hour of Code is an introduction to computer science and an opportunity for the children to try coding through various online activities. Computer science helps to nurture problem solving skills, creativity, and logic.  Check out Hour of Code to learn more and try out coding yourself!

Our nonfiction books are almost done!  So we have decided to have a Publishing Party on December 22nd at 2:15pm in our classrooms.  You are invited to join us and read your child's (and other children's) books!  Please let us know if you are able to attend our Publishing Party! The children are very excited to share their work with you!

SCS Weather Station Link

Due to a grant from the PTO, our school was able to purchase a Weather Station for our school. It is hooked up on the roof and we can go to the library to check the weather. This is perfect for our current weather study!  Here is the link if you would like to access it at home:   SCS Weather Station

See you at the Craft Fair tomorrow!

Esprit Third Grade had a quiet week back from the Thanksgiving Break, with no extra activities happening.  It was a good chance for the children to get back into the routine of school and of our classroom and school expectations. We spent the week working hard and learning many new things.

We are still working hard writing our non-fiction teaching books during Writer's Workshop.  This week we spent some time peer editing and finalizing our rough drafts.  During peer editing, the children read through each other's work and filled out a rubric, commenting on the organization of the piece and making suggestions on how to enhance the writing by adding more details and facts. It was fun to watch them have these conversations with each other.  They were like little editors!  We are now beginning to publish our work and hope to have our final copies completed in time for the Holiday Break.

This week, our Reader's Workshop focused on comprehensions strategies strong readers use when reading information text.  We are practicing these strategies using Scholastic News and other non-fiction texts.  We are working hard to become better at finding the main idea and paraphrasing it, as well as finding evidence to support it.

Our Math learning focused on three-digit subtraction strategies this week.  We practiced using the difference and removal strategies, and compared them to determine when it is most efficient to use each of these strategies.  We also learned about "constant difference".  Constant difference is a strategy mathematicians can use when subtracting numbers.  This strategy is used to make combinations easier to solve by adding or subtracting the same number to or from both the smaller number and the bigger number. For example, 63-39 has the same difference as 64-40; however, 64-40 might be a friendlier equation to solve.  We will continue learning about constant difference next week.

In Science, we worked in groups to learn about the five different climates.  We read articles and shared important learning about those climates.  We will use our knowledge of climates when making a travel suitcase project next week.  Tom Messner, Channel 5 Chief Meteorologist, will be joining us this Tuesday to teach us more about weather and answer questions we have.  Be sure to tune into the news on WPTZ that night and look for Shelburne Third Grade!

This week's Friday Folder will include a School Spelling Bee Study List.  Third graders are invited to participate in the Scripps Spelling Bee, which will take place in January.  This is an optional activity. If your child is not interested in participating, you can disregard the list that is coming home.  If your child would like to participate, please use the list to help him/her prepare for this event.  There is an informational meeting in Christine Hertz's room after school on Wednesday, December 16th, that will give details about the Scripps Spelling Bee.

In two weeks, Susannah, from the Flynn Theater, will be visiting our team with some more Words Come Alive activities for us to participate in.  This week's activities will be connected to this year's Red Clover books.  We look forward to this coming week's activities.



We hope to see everyone at the Holiday Craft Fair tomorrow.  Our soap dishes, soap, and lavender sachets will be displayed and ready to be sold at the Esprit table.  Your children created some beautiful clay pieces that would be a terrific addition to any home.  Stop by and see how talented your children are!
Have a great weekend!