Week of March 18-24

 Good afternoon!! Last week was awesome. We are very, very close to the end of the quarter. Please look in Parent Portal at your child's grades. The end of the nine weeks is March 23rd.  I am trying to get our pace back up, I had a procedure done this past Monday, but I'm feeling better so we should be back on the move this coming week. 

We were supposed to be 3 chapters further along in your chapter book, so we will probably complete 9 chapters this week coming. They will be tested on understanding parts of a letter, combining sentences, and context clues. This week, in addition to the skills we will be working on in our chapter book, we will be covering homophones, quotation marks, correct past tenses of verbs (both regular and irregular), and capitalization errors. This is something I definitely need your help on because we have been working on this skill for months. By now, you should see this in their writing. We are still capitalizing words in the middle of a word or sentences and not capitalizing things they should be. With our novel we will work on point of view, figurative language, problem and solution, tone  and mood, and summarizing. As you can tell, most of these are repeat skills from previously. 

In math, we are still working on fractions. We are actually back in the book in Chapter 11. This chapter will cover equivalent fractions and comparing fractions. What will help them be successful in this chapter will be knowing their multiplication facts. I've stressed this all year and unfortunately, we still have some who do not know their facts. They are going to struggle in this chapter because knowing those facts will help with both equivalent fractions and comparing fractions. In the meantime, some of the skills I am reviewing in small group are rounding and place value (reading a big number, standard form, word form, and expanded form). Both of these skills are trouble areas as was subtraction and addition. We met in small groups last week and almost everyone seems to have it, minus 2 or 3. We are also working on telling time to the nearest minute. The area(s) your child is having trouble in may involve me sending home some practice sheets in that/those areas. 

Below, you will see some of the pictures from our St. Patrick's day. We also had Lucky Charms (for our math) to use with fractions. I was only able to catch a few pictures, sorry. Trying to catch pictures while I was preparing the punch was hard. LOL!! 

Last but not least, we will also be learning about the March Madness brackets.  We have 2 teams we are supposed to be learning about: Virginia Tech and Gulf Coast of Florida. Funny thing is they played each other, so it's really hard to root for them. We will definitely be going into this diligently this week, though I have told the kids we're going for the Gamecocks (😁)!! 

GO COCKS!!!!

We also have a lot of important dates coming up that I have included below.

Days to be Aware of for April

1 - Class/Spring Pictures, GATORFEST

8 - 11:30 AM Dismissal

11-15 - Spring Break

Test Days Remaining 

(Please try to be present these days.)

March 29 - ELA Benchmark

March 30 - Math Benchmark

April 5 - 3rd Grade Reading MAP

May 4 & 5 - SC Ready ELA

May 10 - SC Ready Math

May 19 - Field Test all grades - TDA

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St. Patrick's photos

Week of March 7-11

 Guess what, we're one week closer to the end of our 3rd nine weeks. Can you believe that we're almost at the end of our 3rd grade 2021-2022 school year?!!! I definitely can't. I want you to go back and look at the work and writing your child did at the beginning of the year compared to now. They have really grown and we will continue to grow the last 12-13 weeks we have left. They're rocking it!!

We are working on fractions and measurement in math. We're slowly migrating into Chapter 11. We will have a quiz on Tuesday, the 8th, on fractions greater than 1 on the number line (improper and mixed fractions), converting them, using pictorial models to represent them, and measuring to the nearest inch, quarter of an inch, and half inch using line plots. They should have papers that shows examples of these in their math notebook. Also, it's very important that they are practicing their math vocabulary. I use it all the time in math class and a few of them are still struggling. They are going to struggle if they don't know the vocabulary. Please practice it with them. Another thing, we work on daily is our Math 4 Today. I am reiterating this from a previous blog, I have started counted the assessments for the Math 4 Today as graded quizzes as well. These are supposed to be glued into the back of their notebooks. We are on week 23 and going to test on that one (Math 4 Today) on Thursday, the 10th.

In reading, we are continuing James and the Giant Peach. We are going into Chapters 10-12 on this Monday, they will take a quiz on it Wednesday, the 9th.  I will be covering characters, character traits, figurative language, and problem/solution (all with text evidence) this week through this novel. They also have vocabulary words and prefixes/suffixes/homographs they need to be practicing. I will give them a quick check on those words on Friday, the 11th. These words are also in their notebook. By the end of this week, we will have finished Chapter 18 by Friday. 

In language arts/writing, we will continue to work on capitalization errors, adjectives, apostrophes, letter writing, and singular/plural nouns. This goes along with our Reading 4 Today. We will take a quiz on this on Tuesday, March 15th. In writing, we have worked on writing introductions and will continue into the body of an essay this week. 

In science, we will be wrapping up soil this week and moving into social studies. They will take an open note quiz on soil on Monday, the 14th. The social studies I had completed before was tied into our black history activities. We actually created a mini book on the African-Americans we studied, including Gabbie Goodwin. 

We are going to have a great week this week and I look forward to seeing everyone in class tomorrow. WE GOT THIS!!!!

Photos from Read Across America