We have settled into our classroom routines and the following are just some of the ways students are actively learning:  questioning, inferring, predicting, hypothesizing, observing, describing, categorizing, discussing, organizing, and analyzing! 

During reader’s workshop, students are engaged in “good fit” books and are using comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and vocabulary strategies to improve as readers.  Ask your child to share both his/her current strategy of strength and goal strategy with you.  We encourage students to apply these strategies at home, which is an indication that students feel ownership of the strategies and are transferring their understanding to novel reading situations outside of the classroom!

Third grade writers are developing their knowledge of the steps in the writing process (pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing) and the work that each step entails.  Throughout our first unit of study, students studied the writing in a descriptive paragraph, chose a seed idea to zoom into, and then… drafted, revised, edited, and published his/her own descriptive paragraph.  A few crafts students practiced were including sensory language and “cracking open” dull words, phrases, or sentences.  During and after the process, students self-evaluated the writing and themselves as writers! 

We’ve also worked on how to use descriptive language in our scientific observation notes and our math reasoning/explanations, so students are realizing that describing is a skill they can apply in many contents and contexts.

In our upcoming writing study, students will be studying how writers gather ideas for personal narrative writing, what makes an engaging story an engaging story, what makes an inviting beginning and satisfying ending, and what makes a personal narrative writing piece flow.  These essential understandings are intertwined with the traits (ideas/content, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions) writers include and refine in all writing pieces.

Third grade mathematicians recently finished a data analysis unit in which they had to construct, read, and interpret categorical and numerical displays of data. They were given the opportunity to explore an inquiry question of their own by collecting, organizing, representing, and interpreting/describing the data they gathered.  Students also demonstrated the process of measuring and developed their sense of measurement by estimating measurements and collecting measurement data using various units of measure.

Our current unit, Collections and Travel Stories, places an emphasis on number sense (base ten number system, whole number operations, and computational fluency).  Students will demonstrate understanding of place value concepts through their ability to count, order, and group. They will use their number sense to estimate and demonstrate fluency with basic addition and subtraction facts.  As an extension to unit one, students will continue to show conceptual meanings of the basic operations of addition and subtraction and will use appropriate algorithms (strategies) for computing with whole numbers in problem solving situations. As a reminder, the parent letter and pamphlet for each unit are wonderful resources to refer to at home!

Throughout our Life Cycles Unit, scientists observed and recorded their observations of the butterfly as it transformed into different stages of its life cycle.  They also have been recording observations of the class “mystery objects” and “mystery creatures.”  They are thoughtfully creating and putting the scientific process into action.  They will conclude the unit with their own inquiry study of an organism of interest by researching the organism and its life cycle.  This study will align with the third grade ETIL (educational technology information literacy) standards giving students an opportunity to demonstrate that they can locate, evaluate, and ethically use information from a variety of sources to produce a digital product (power point).

We are looking forward to our fieldtrip to the Butterfly Pavilion on October 29^th and our Halloween Parade and celebration starting at 2:15 on October 30^th!

Thank you for your continued support at home.  We appreciate all that you do.

The Third Grade Team

Megan Waterman, Amy Kline, and Jackie Hjelden