Mrs. Fox's Third Grade: April 6, 2018

Announcements

We have the official dates for 3rd grade MAP testing. We will be doing the Math portion of the test on Wednesday, April 25th and Thursday, April 26th. The Language Arts portion will be Monday, April 30th and Tuesday, May 1st. Please refrain from scheduling trips or appointments on these days. We will be testing mainly in the morning but students are allowed to keep working if they are making forward progress. If a student misses one of these days, they will need to make up the testing when they return. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Please check with your third grader about ear buds for the MAP test and pencils. We have quite a few 3rd graders that are completely out of pencils.

Mark Your Calendars!

We will be having a Poetry Breakfast in the classroom on Friday, May 4th. I will send more information later but wanted to send the date in case you need to make arrangements. This will be a potluck breakfast from 7:40-8:20 where students can share their poetry with families.

We had a wonderful time at the Planetarium on Monday!

In the Classroom

In math this week, we did a little measuring but mostly focused on multiplication. Students learned how to use basic facts to do expanded facts in multiples of 10. For example, knowing 8x9=72 can help you solve 8x?=720. We also did this for division. Students learned how to find factor pairs for multiples and applied this knowledge to a complex word problem involving chairs.

We started our Poetry unit this week! Students explored a variety of poetry books and each chose one that spoke to them in some way to share with the class.

On Wednesday, we read a poem about Pirate Candy! Ask your third grader what that might be.

Thursday, we wrote month poems inspired by the book, In November by Cynthia Rylant. I am already impressed with how creative their poetry has been!

In reading this week, we began doing preparation for the MAP test. Students learned about test taking strategies like Slash the Trash (cross out answers you know it can't be) and Be Slick and Predict (try to predict the answer before reading the choices.) We used these strategies on a variety of texts and will continue to practice next week.

We began our Ecosystems unit this week. Students learned about the four components of an ecosystem and the difference between living and non-living. We also played a game called Survivor to learn about the things necessary to survive in any ecosystem.