Mrs. Fox's Third Grade: Weekly Update-March 25

Announcements

I hope everyone has a wonderful and relaxing Spring Break!

Weekly Journals and Friday Folders were not completed this week. They will both resume after Spring Break.

We still have many openings left for our booth at the Comet Carnival. Please consider volunteering 20 minutes the night of the carnival to help our class.

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/70a0f49afad23a75-comet12

Thank you to everyone who donated 2 liter bottles for our science project! We have enough for our class, but please consider sending bottles in after Spring Break in case other third grade classes are short.

We have received the MAP schedule for third grade. Our class will be testing:

May 6th

May 9th

May 10th

May 12th

May 13th

We will only be testing in the mornings, but students are allowed to keep working as long as necessary if it is not timed. Please refrain from scheduling vacations or appointments on these days. If appointments are necessary, we would appreciate them being scheduled in the afternoons if possible. Students will have to do make up testing if they are not here those mornings. More information will be coming out after Spring Break about what you can do to prepare for the MAP test as well as what we will be doing here. Please let me know if you have any questions.

In the Classroom

In our Fractions unit this week, students learned about fractions of a set. They also studied benchmark fractions like 1/2, 1/4, and 1/3. We discussed how people use these fractions to estimate amounts in everyday life. For example: We are about halfway through the book.

For our Ecosystems unit, students made a food chain using specific vocabulary words like producer and consumer. We also did an activity to experience what it is like to be a predator in the wild! Each student was told which predator they were, what their prey was, and how much they needed to survive. Pictures of different prey were around the room, and they were asked to stalk and capture it. (Walk around quietly and place a sticky note on it.) Once an animal had three sticky notes on it, they prey was officially dead. Sadly, some of our predators did not survive. We discussed how some prey was camouflaged, hidden, or out of reach making it hard for us to capture it.

This activity led to a discussion about animal adaptations including migration and hibernation.

In reading this week, students each had jobs to complete daily in their guided reading groups. These jobs included predictor, questioner, visualizer, connector, summarizer, and word finder. Ask your third grader what their favorite job was!

We finished typing our opinion pieces this week. Students shared their pieces with each other to do partner peer reviews. They also shared them with me to do a teacher revision. We will finish publishing these pieces after Spring Break.