Mrs. Fox's Third Grade: Weekly Update-September 22

Announcements

A big thank you to Stefanie Arnold for taking the role of Parent Room Coordinator! We still need someone to volunteer for the game and craft at our Fall room party. The kids look forward to these parties so much, and I would love for them to be successful and fun. Please consider signing up to help!

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090a4baaa723aa8-room

Thank you to everyone who returned a consent form for the University of Missouri student that was in Friday folders a few weeks ago. However, we were just informed the consent forms were changed this year and the old versions were sent out. You will find the new version in the Friday folder. Please sign it and return with your third grader next week. We are sorry for the confusion!

Every Monday, we have a class meeting. This is an opportunity to discuss upcoming events, problem solve any classroom issues, and share about our weekends. Every student has 30-60 seconds to share something with the class. If students do not want to share about the weekend, they are allowed to bring in an object to share. This object should be able to fit in their backpacks and will stay there until class meeting time. Students should not take the object out to recess or out in the classroom. Some students think this is an opportunity to play with that object during class. I have discussed the expectations with students, but wanted you to be aware as well. Thank you for your help with this matter.

Students are allowed to bring a healthy snack for the morning, as we do not eat lunch until 1:00. Please remind students to bring a snack or purchase one from the cafeteria in the morning before coming up to the classroom.

In the Classroom

In math this week, we continued to focus on addition. Students practiced adding three digit numbers, adding more than 2 numbers, and how to solve various word problems. We will assess over this unit next week and then move on to subtraction.

Our focus in writing this week was zooming in on small moment stories. Many times, third graders try to write a story that includes too many events or even stories that take place over a full day or weekend. Instead, we are learning to choose a small moment and stretch it out with strong details. We read the book Zoom and also looked at many examples of small moment stories.

We also started writing cursive letters this week! We will learn 2-3 letters per week. We will always learn and practice the letters in class. I will also give students time to start on their homework. They are required to write at least 4 letters per line. When we start knowing enough letters to write words, they are required to write at least 2 words per line.

Our focus in shared reading this week was problem and solution. We read books together to practice finding the problems and solutions. Students also looked for problems and solutions in their independent books. We started our reading response routine. Each day, students will be asked to respond to a specific question regarding their independent book. They will be asked to use text evidence to help support their answer. Here is picture of the types of questions they will be answering and sentence starters to help with their responses.

Here is one example of a response a student completed on the book, A Bad Case of Stripes.

In Social Studies, we finished our discussion about urban, rural, and suburban communities. We also talked about the names of our city, state, and country. Students made a book with the names and pictures of all their communities including school, city, state, country, and continent.