While reading our nonfiction texts we come across a lot of words that are brand new to us. We will be working hard to pronounce, understand, and use the new vocabulary. We will learn how to use context clues and text features to determine the meaning of these new words. When you talk to your child about reading, ask them what new words they read today, what they mean, and how they could use them in everyday life!
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On Wednesday afternoon Mrs. Hultink's and Mrs. Schut's 3rd grade classes had a visitor. They had just finished learning about Helen Keller during their biography unit. To learn a little more about what it is like for someone to be blind we had a visit from a women who is blind. She talked with the children about what it was like for her growing up and going to school, as well as how she succeeded in college. She brought many of the tools she uses to show the students such as her talking calculator, a computer that helps her take and read notes, as well as a tool that helps her to write in braille! We learned a lot from her and are very grateful that she was able to make time to visit our classroom!
This week we will be wrapping up our light unit. Our test will be on Wednesday. Our next unit of study is all about sound. We will be learning how sound is created and how it travels. Third graders will be exploring sound through the use of musical instruments.
This week we will continue to work on the suffix -ed. We learned last week that when -ed is added to the end of a word, it becomes past tense. This week we will learn that the -ed sound can make three different sounds. It can say “t” like in walked, “d” like in spelled, and “ed” like in ended.
Practice at home: Try practicing your words at home this week by cutting out letters out of the newspaper or out of a magazine. Glue the letters together to create your spelling words. We are starting a new unit this week, all about word problems! Word problems are probably one of the hardest math topics for students, however they are the most important types of problems...because they are all about REAL life situations. To solve word problems, students will learn to think critically about the problems, many times this includes acting out or drawing pictures of what the problem is really asking. While helping your child with homework, ask them to draw pictures or act out the problems that are tricky for them. Here are two parent-friendly videos explaining the strategies your child will be taught to solve these word problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcEB8pPAuYs (math mountains) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGfwCLPLF5U (comparison bars) Please click on the heading at the top to view the unit 5 family letter! For the next few weeks students will be working on drafting their non-fiction information into well formed chapters. Students will be expected to write a descriptive, sequential, and comparative chapter. This week we will be focusing on descriptive writing. Students will first make a web to help organize their thoughts. Then, we will learn how to write a topic sentence to introduce this chapter. Finally, we will voracious writers as we write and describe various parts of our topic.
Hello 3rd Graders! I hope you are doing well! It was very, very, very early on Monday morning when my family got a big surprise! The baby was coming early! By 5:30 I was able to hold my brand new baby BOY! He was pretty big for a baby...but still super small. In fact his feet are shorter than my thumbs! He also has a lot of hair! So far he's been a great little baby boy! He loves to snuggle all day. His big sister Alivia LOVES to take care of him. Big sister Addison isn't quite sure what to think of him. I think she thinks he's a toy :). I miss all of you a lot and I'm sorry we didn't officially get to say good-bye! I promise I will bring him in to see you as soon as he's old enough. I hope you're being good for Miss Foley and showing her all that you know. Here are some pictures of Owen! This week we will be working on adding -ed and -ing to the end of words. We will learn that -ed makes the word past tense and that adding -ing makes the word present tense. We will also learn that if the word has a short vowel, we need to double the last consonant. For example, hop→ hopping, stop→ stopped. If the vowel is long, we can simply add the -ed or -ing.
Practice at home: Try practicing your words at home this week by writing a letter to a family member or friend. Try to use as many spelling words as you can! This week we will be learning about a new unit on light! We will be exploring the differences between man made and natural light sources. Third graders will be having some fun experimenting with light! The students will be investigating how light travels. Through this investigation, students will be learning that light travels in a straight line, but an object can also block a light source creating a shadow. Your child will be bringing home a bag on Tuesdayto fill with four objects (must be small enough to fit in bag). Please return bag to school on Wednesday, we will be using these to create shadows. Lastly, we will discover how light can appear to bend (optical illusion) and also how light travels through various liquids (transparent, translucent, opaque).
We have officially hired Courtney Foley as my long term substitute. Courtney will begin to come into our classroom during the next two weeks to learn how we normally go about things. She will begin taking over the classroom sometime around March 26th and finish the year with the students. Attached is a letter from Ms. Foley.
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