This Week in CC-3

We've had a busy and productive week here in CC-3!  We hope your child shared with you all about our special "Day in the Dark" celebration on Monday.  It was a great day of learning and celebration.  We were so proud of all of our students and their ability to get a lot accomplished as well as have some fun at the same time.  It is crazy to think that the first quarter of the academic year concludes this week!  We've completed a lot of projects recently and are moving on with exciting new units of study.  Below is an academic update.

Kindness Projects
Our kindness projects of the year continue with great success!  This week CC-3 students carried out our Trick-Or-Treat for UNICEF project.  Students collected and counted all the money submitted by EMES students.  We are happy to report that the EMES community donation to UNICEF was a little over $400!  A few donations are still trickling in, we will let you know our grand total soon.  Our students separated all of the coins, counted them, and rolled them.  We were able to get in a lot of practice counting coins this week in math.

Literacy
We've recently concluded our first reading and writing units of the year.  It has been exciting to see students develop wonderful reading and writing habits over the course of the past two months.  Now it's time to set new goals and conquer new heights!

Today, we launched our new reading unit.  It's all about MYSTERIES!  Throughout this unit students will be introduced to the "big" ideas of the mystery genre while working on the important foundational skills of  story elements, predicting, envisioning, retelling, summarizing and analyzing author's craft.  Before you know it, your child will be devouring many popular mystery series!  We will also begin writing more about our reading with the important goal of finding evidence to support ideas and theories.

Please encourage your child to transport books they are reading between home and school.  We want students moving through chapter books.  The best way to do this is to read the same text at home and school.  Remember, your child should be reading independently for a minimum of 20 minutes each night!  We have an easy process for signing out books to borrow in our classroom that all students know.

In writing class, we'll be working on several skills during the next three weeks before we move on to our informational writing unit in early December.  Our skill work will include: spelling instruction, sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and parts of speech.

Math
We have been spending a lot of time on solving word problems that include repeated addition.  Many of these problems have multiple steps to solve.  When given a word problem, students are working on reading the problem and determining what is the important information, what operation(s) to use, what strategy would work best, and labeling their solution.

This week we began to investigate equal groups.  This will lead us into our work with arrays and area. These are all models of multiplication.  Kids are always so excited to learn their multiplication facts.  Well, third grade is their year!


Discovery
As we all know, the election is next Tuesday!  In class we've been learning a bit about the election process.  We continue our study of the United States, its symbols and landmarks.  Students are working in partnerships to research  a specific national symbol or landmark.  They will then share their learning with others.  Teams are working on learning about the following:

• The Bald Eagle
• Liberty Bell
• White House
• The Great Seal
• The American Flag
• Statue of Liberty

Technology Integration
This week we began a new project with Ms. Arlyn.  We'll be using a program on iPads called   as a story retelling tool.  We're working on reading picture books, creating a written summary for the text, building scenes with Legos and inputting it all into the program.  We'll be working on this project for the next several weeks.  It was incredibly exciting to see partnerships go to work this week and demonstrate successful collaboration skills.

We look forward to meeting with families next week for conferences.  We've got a busy Thursday afternoon/evening scheduled as well as Friday appointments.  You should have received both a hard copy (bright orange) confirmation notice as well as an email.  If you do not know when your conference is, please let us know, we'll confirm your time.  We're excited to share your child's progress with you and set new goals for the future. Have a great weekend!

Tidbits

• New book orders are due on Thursday, November 10th.
• Indoor and outdoor shoes are needed each day!
• No school next Friday, November 11th due to Parent Conferences!

Have a great weekend!
Christine and Kathy