Updates before break!

Thank you so much for your attendance at last week's Student Led Conferences.  We had 100% attendance! Our students were so proud to share their learning with you!  What a celebration of this amazing group of third graders!  Please remember, we are more than happy to meet with you if you have any further questions.  We feel we touched base with every family, but we also know new things come up in the Spring!

Here's our academic update!

Literacy
First, we'll conclude our mystery unit on Friday by teaching our first and second-grade buddies key ideas about being mystery readers.  Students are planning a lesson to teach buddies that will include many of the ideas we've learned.  For example:
Readers of Mysteries...

• Ask what is the mystery here?
• Ask who are the crime solvers?
• Ask who are the suspects?
• Question whether suspects have motive and/or opportunity.
• Pay attention to clues.
• Pause to retell the story.
• Reread parts that are tricky.
• Read on "High Alert!"
• Think about how mystery books tend to go.
• Look out for "red herrings"!

Second, we've finished up our opinion writing unit.  Although some students still have opinion pieces to share after break, the bulk of our classroom unit in this genre is complete.  Our next writing unit will be focused on team work in writing and illustrating traditional tales. We'll be working with Ms. Arlyn in both library and technology classes to create a variety of narrative tales.  These could be:  fairy tales, folks tales, tall tales, fractured fairy tales, trickster tales, etc.  The unit promises to be exciting and fun!  We'll also study these tales in reader's workshop. 

Math
We are continuing our work with multiplication by focusing on multiplying two-digit by one-digit numbers.  We are working with decade numbers, and beginning to incorporate other two-digit numbers in our equations.  Currently, students build, draw, and solve these problems using a strategy called Partial Product Recording.  This strategy allows students use their knowledge of their basic multiplication facts and place value to find the product. 

Partial Product                                    30                                                        14
                                                           x   6                                                     x   3
                                                                0   (ones)                                           12  (ones)
                                                           180    (18 tens)                                       30  ( 3 tens)
                                                           180                                                         42

Students have been working hard to learn and gain fluency of their multiplication facts, which supports their work with more complex multiplication problems such as these.  They have done a great job with NX0, NX1, NX2, NX5, and NX10.  Students have made super progress with their NX9 and NX4 facts.  It would be great to help your son or daughter practice these 9's and 4's families at home.  Ask your son or daughter to tell you about the "Think Ten" and "Double Double" strategies. 

In addition to our regular math lessons, we have begun to incorporate elapsed time problems in our morning meetings.  Ask your son or daughter to show you how they use a number line to solve these problems.  If you are wondering how to incorporate math at home, talking about and connecting real-life situations to our work with elapsed time is a great idea.

Example: 
I wanted to try a new recipe for dinner.  It said it would take me 12 minutes to prepare the food, and 25 minutes to cook it.  If I started at 5:00 pm, will dinner be ready by 5:45 pm? Explain your thinking.

Science

This week we began Discovery (aka science) work on the properties of magnetism.  The students had a blast checking out objects to see if they were magnetic.  They made some good predictions and discovered some surprises.  They also began to investigate the big ideas of this unit including the ideas of push and pull, and repel and attract with magnet cars.  Students will enjoy the many investigations and data collection that will go along with this unit. 

In other news, this week we were reminded by our superintendent about our responsibilities in regard to confidentiality and email correspondence.  We totally understand email is frequently the best way for all of us to communicate in our busy lives.  We just need to be more mindful going forward and refrain from addressing specific student names, or needs within email.  Rest assured, that communicating with you about your child is one of our greatest priorities, we just need to be cognizant of the fact that detailed conversations need to happen face to face or by phone.  We hope you understand that we can't email about your child's specific academic, emotional or social needs in an electronic form.  This is so that we can honor confidentiality.  We're always more than happy to chat or set up a conference. Our classroom phone # is 223-7936, ext 350.  Mrs. Christiano's reteach classroom is ext. 323, and Mrs. Christy's office ext. is 309.  Please don't hesitate to send us an email or voicemail that you'd like a phone call back.

• Book Orders went out this week, we hope they'll be here when students return from break.
• Please remember that indoor and outdoor shoes will still probably be a necessity when we return on April, 23rd! 

Thank you!  Have a great Spring Break with your kids!

Christine and Kathy