October 18, 2009

Greetings!

   Hope you are staying warm during this cold October! 

    We will be wrapping up our rocks and minerals study on Monday and will move into our unit on Native Americans.  We begin by learning about the Wampanoags who were an Eastern Woodlands tribe, and creating our own characters and family members as we experience what life was like for this tribe before the colonists settled here.  Our field trip to Indian Rock gave us some important background knowledge of how Native Americans lived off the land and wasted nothing.  We will build on this knowledge as we study the Wampanoags.   

     Thank you for continuing to sign reading logs each night, and encouraging your student to read.  In class, we are reviewing and applying the various reading strategies that good readers use--so far, we have worked on making connections, questioning, and writing good summaries.  We will also work on predicting, visualizing, activating our prior knowledge, and making inferences.  We are using picture books for turn and talk so we can stop and share our different strategies with classmates, as well as chart what we are noticing about these strategies.    

      In math, we will begin our second unit on addition.   In 3rd grade, our goal is that all the basic addition facts become automatic, as this foundation helps so much when we get into multiplication and division.   Please work some daily practice with the basic facts into your student's life!  We'll be doing some mad minute sheets in class to get a baseline for the time it takes to complete a sheet, and I'll send home copies of these for practice as well.  There is a link you can access through this page called mathfact cafe--you can choose to practice addition, subtraction, multiplication or division facts, and it generates worksheets for you to print out for your student, too.

       In writing, we are continuing to work on various pieces, with periodic strategies for getting started in our writing.  We are also using writer's workshop time to go through the steps of our word study (word sorts, speed sorts, word hunts, no peeking sorts and reflections), and students will begin their first official word study list this week.  There will be a homework component to this as well, because word study relies on repetition and having the students really think about why the words are grouped together in certain ways--it helps them to apply the patterns and sounds they learn to unfamiliar words that fit these patterns and sounds.

Mrs. LaRock

Phone:  648-5025, ext. 1604

E-mail:  alarock2@swindsor.k12.ct.us