Happy Friday!

Just a couple of quick reminders for the weekend!

On Monday, we'll be having a special school wide assembly to celebrate our friend and alumnus, Olympian Liz Stephen.  Students are welcome to dress in red, white and blue for the occasion.  You're welcome to come and join in the festivities, we'll begin about 9:15, lasting until about 10 a.m.

Also, we are collecting non-perishable food items for the East Montpelier/Calais Food Shelf. Students are welcome to bring in donations until April 11th.

Finally, many families will celebrate the holiday with sweet treats this weekend.  Please help us help your kids, by not sending in candy treats for snack or lunch next week.  

Thanks so much!  Have a great weekend!  Kathy and Christine

Classroom Updates and Reminders

It's hard to believe that next week will mark the end of the third quarter of third grade.  We've been very busy here in CC3 reflecting on this fact and preparing for student led conferences next Friday, April 6th.  Read on for our classroom updates!

Writing
In writing workshop we're focusing on opinion writing.  This includes writing a clear opinion statement that is supported with relevant reasons and evidence.  Recently, we've been revisiting Red Clover Nominee books from the last four years and considering which books students felt were really worthy of the award.  We've focused on the particular structure of writing opinion pieces, and supplying enough evidence to convince readers.  During the next couple of weeks will continue to refine this writing work by elaborating and adding more voice to strengthen pieces.

For this particular unit, students are now being given the choice to use their chromebooks and write on Google Docs, or use pencil and paper.  We're learning more about the Google domain and it's advantages for revising and editing, but it is also important to still offer some student choice, as keyboarding is still challenging for many.  Any time that you can find at home for your child to practice keyboarding is truly beneficial.

Reading and Discovery
We'll be wrapping up our mystery unit in the next week or so.  Students have done a great job reading a variety of mysteries and concentrating on being great reading detectives.  They've become more adept at picking out clues, identifying suspects, and reading on "high alert" for suspicious characters and events. Students have learned what "red herrings" are and have made great progress identifying key and fake clues, sometimes even identifying some solutions before they are revealed in the text.  Students have also become detectives in Discovery class.  They are realizing the importance of close observation and have conducted investigations with both lip and fingerprints.  We may just have some budding forensic scientists in our midst!

Spelling/Grammar
We've continued to work on parts of speech.  This week we've focused on verbs and verb tenses.  We've concentrated on the fact that verbs need to change in their spelling to indicate present, past and future tenses.

SBAC:  Our third grade students will be participating in their first SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) assessments in early May.  The testing window for 3rd grade will be May 2nd-May10th.  We will be doing assessment preparation with students during our Reteach block beginning April 9th.  It is important for third graders to participate in practice tests so that they can learn the computer navigation skills necessary for these online assessments.  Both Mrs. Christiano and Mrs. Christy will be working with students on this prep, as well as when doing the actual assessments in May.

Upcoming and Ongoing Special Events

• Monday, April 2:  All school assembly for East Montpelier's very own Olympian Liz Stephen.  Students are invited to wear red, white and blue in celebration of Liz's accomplishments as she retires from her professional skiing career.  
• Thursday, April 5 and Friday, April 6:  Student Led Conferences-you should have received your confirmation time in last week's Friday Folder.  Let us know if you're not sure of your time.
• March 27-April 12:The EMES Student Leadership Team is sponsoring a Food Drive to Benefit the East Montpelier and Calais Food Shelf located at The Old Brick Church.   A collection box will be located in each classroom as well as along the hallways of EMES. Helpful items include:
• Canned meat, soup, and vegetables
• Peanut butter
• Whole grain cereals
• Olive and Canola oil
• Pasta and pasta sauces
• Tuna
• Healthy snacks like granola bars, nuts and dried fruit

• April 15-22: WCSU Spring Break

Other Reminders

• The playground is wet and muddy, indoor and outdoor shoes are really a necessity until things melt and dry up!
• Sharing after break involves two important literacy assignments, the writing of an opinion piece and the sharing of a mystery book. Students should be preparing now so they have plenty of time to do this work well.  Support materials have been sent home. 

April Homework Preview!

Today in CC 3 we got a head start on our April Sharing Calendar/Homework.  The reason for this quick start is due to the fact that next month's sharing and projects involve time and planning!

Today, Mrs. Christy shared and explicitly taught the information necessary to be successful with both assignments. Students are also bringing home this information today!
The big ideas include:

• There are TWO assignments/projects for April.
• One project is sharing about a Mystery book students need to read at home.
• One project is  writing an opinion piece about a book of choice.  
• Students can choose what project they want to share on what date.  They can do the mystery book first, and the opinion piece second, or vice versa.  It is up to the individual.  

Please ask your child to share the new calendar and the support materials with you.  It's important for students to realize they need to make choices and be ready.  There should be ample time to complete both assignments with quality.  We'll continue to talk about them in class as well.  We just wanted to make sure everyone had a heads up!  We're happy to answer any questions students may have.

Thanks!  Christine and Kathy

CC3 Updates!

Welcome back from Winter Break!  Although it appears that winter is not yet ready to leave us, we are thankful that we did not have a snow day this week!  Students were ready and eager for our return on Wednesday.  We hit the ground running and have many new exciting projects and learning opportunities launched!  Here are our curriculum updates.

Technology
This week students began working on Lego Robotics with Ms. Arlyn and Mrs. Christiano.  This unit will include a lot of collaboration and teamwork as well as working with models, coding and adapting robots by modifying.  This unit is loaded with both science and transferable skill standards.  Make sure to ask your child what he/she is working on with robotics!

Reading Workshop
We launched our MYSTERY unit this week!  This is always an exciting unit that requires students to read very carefully and think like detectives.  Students are already getting excited about reading many mysteries, often from a mystery series.  Students participated in a fun mystery scavenger hunt in library class on Thursday.  They followed clues to locate mystery books, many of them were checked out by students after our hunt.  Our EMES and classroom library are filled with many mystery book choices!  Popular series include:  Encyclopedia Brown, A to Z Mysteries, Nate the Great, Cam Jansen, The Boxcar Children, Jigsaw Jones, Nancy Drew, The Buddy Mysteries.  This unit will continue for the next few weeks, ask your child how he/she is growing like a detective.  Currently we are asking ourselves two big questions...

• What is the mystery?  
• Who is/are the crime solver(s)?

Writing Workshop
Students are currently working on writing pieces of their choice.  Many students have paired up with another author to create a collaborative piece.  Students are trying out graphic novels as well as poetry and fictional narratives.  Next week, we'll launch our opinion writing unit by completing our unit pre-assessments.

Spelling/Grammar
We are currently concentrating on parts of speech.  We have covered nouns-both proper and common as well as singular and plural.  Students are being careful about noticing and discussing the fact that many words can be either a noun or an adjective depending on how they are used in a sentence.

March Kindness Project
We're building some Kindness Trees outside our classroom on the bulletin board.  We're making a very conscious effort to remain kind and positive throughout our days.  Students are writing explicit, specific examples of things they have done to spread kindness.  We're looking forward to watching our trees really bloom as we welcome Spring!

Math
In math, we're continuing our work with fractions by adding and subtracting fractions that have common denominators.  We are also working on rounding whole numbers to the nearest ten or hundred.

Students came back from the winter vacation ready to take the next step in their multiplication work as well.  This week we used Cuisenaire rods to build models of 2-digit by 1-digit equations and then we solved the equations using partial products.

Assessments
Right before break we completed our Civil Rights Unit which you had an opportunity to see at our EMES Celebration of Learning.  We're sure you'll agree that the projects were terrific and students did an amazing job with this work.  This work also addressed multiple standards and performance indicators-nineteen to be exact!  Today, students are bringing home the assessment pieces that were included in this work.  Students have four different rubrics.

• The "Overall" Civil Rights Project Assessment Rubric
• The Google Slides Assessment Rubric
• The Oral Presentation Assessment Rubric
• The Collaboration Rubric-(there are 2 of these, one done by each student, one by Mrs. Christy.

Upcoming Events

• Student Led Conferences April 5th and 6th.  Please find the blue sign-up sheet in your child's folder and return to us ASAP.