Third Nine Week's Frenzy Forewarning!

Parents:

The Third 9-week period of 3rd grade is a very busy one.  I want to give you an advance look at what is upcoming and hopefully ease your mind about what parent involvement might be.

Science Fair:  If your child is a creative thinker or interested in the sciences, I highly recommend that you encourage them to do the science fair.  For third grade, this project is done entirely at home.  Whether they enter a project or not, come enjoy Math and Science Night to view projects, play grade level math games and participate in science activities.  

Reading Comprehension Passages:  In order to have students demonstrate their reading stamina and use all their reading comprehension skills they will be taking one or two reading passages weekly.  Our class will typically do this on Thursday.  While this has proven over the years to be invaluable practice which makes kids more confident going into STAAR testing, sometimes Reading grades will slip.  We are also scheduled to take a STAAR-Ready reading and math tests in February -- think of it as a practice!  Students will be given the full 4 hours to complete.

Living Museum:  As part of our Language Arts unit on learning about the lives of others, students will be choosing an inventor/scientist/entrepreneur or innovator to research.  All research will be done in class using nonfiction books, biographies and websites.  The students will then write a brochure about the subject of their research ...this too will be done during class-time.  As a culminating event, the grade level invites parents to our Living Museum.  Students dress up and have props for their presentation.  These materials are created at home.  It can be as simple as a poster, a poster costume, a bottle figure or full costume.   Specific information will go home in a letter to parents.

Economic's Fair:  Students learn some very sophisticated things about our free enterprise system.  To make that learning more concrete and accessible, 3rd graders have an economics fair and are both producers and consumers.  The goods that they choose to sell do not have to be either complex or expensive.  Students will have an inventory of less than 20 items.  Some examples are items from the Dollar Store to resell, home-made slime, decorated pencils or coupons for a service.  Again there will be a detailed letter going home in advance of the project with more examples.  The point is while it does have to be done at home, it should not be overwhelming for either the child or parent!

Snow in Texas and December already ... two things I have trouble believing.

All:

I can scarcely believe that we are nearing the end of our first semester -- they're 3 1/2 graders!

At this midpoint, there are so many things to celebrate.  I just did another round of reading assessments with your children and I have seen growth from every single child.  Some students when up as many as 4 levels.  Hopefully this reflects new confidence and enjoyment of reading as well as improvement.

In math we are beginning our unit on Geometry.  This will mean a SHORT review of 2D shapes, remembering vocabulary and lots of discussion about the characteristics of different quadrilaterals.  It comes up every year so I'm going to give you the parent short course:

That square is a special kind of rectangle
The rhombus is a special kind of parallelogram
Technically, all four of them are parallelograms and quadrilaterals.  It blows my mind a little.  I don't think I could think this "think" until I was in high school.

We'll move onto 3D figures, more vocabulary and more characteristics to describe.

In science we've begun a study of soil and have invited a few worms into the classroom to see how decomposition works (maybe).  

In language arts we'll wrap up our study of literary non-fiction and move on to traditional tales to round out our understanding of different genres.

The new year will bring all kinds of exciting learning for 3rd graders including our economic fair and living museum.

But for now ... as we are headed to our holiday break, continue to remind your kids to do their best at their jobs so that we can enjoy our upcoming vacation.