Egyptian Fruit Bat ready to enjoy an apple!

Week of October 9-12

Hello all!  I hope you are all enjoying the Columbus Day holiday.  Here's what's happening this week in 3rd grade.

Author Visit-  Third Grade has the wonderful opportunity to meet Annie Barrows the popular author of the Ivy and Bean series.  She will be speaking to the students on Thursday afternoon.  If your student would like to purchase a book and get her autograph, just send back the purple order form that was given to students last week. Below the picture is a link to her website which gives more information about the series.

Ivy and Bean

Interim Assessments - This week Tuesday through Friday, the students will be taking diagnostic tests called Interim Assessments.  These tests are for district information about our current instruction and the gaps in the new Common Core standards.  This information is for district analysis only and no scores will be given to teachers or students. They will last approx. 45 to an hour a day.  

Reading - We are continuing our bat unit this week.  Besides learning wonderful bat facts, the classes will be comparing fiction and non-fiction, putting events in sequence, recognizing the difference between fact and opinion and doing some basic research.  At the end of the unit, students will be making some cute little bats to go along with our skeletons!  It's beginning to feel like Halloween in third grade! Some important vocabulary is ...

echolocation - nocturnal- mammal - species - megabat - microbat 

Writing - The students will be finishing up their Sea Creature stories this week.  Students will be revising and editing their rough drafts in preparation for writing their final copies. This is an engaging assignment that allowed students to use their creativity,  practice writing paragraphs and work through the writing process. 

Grammar - The first quarter is devoted to reviewing nouns, verbs, adjectives, and types of sentences.

Spelling - List #6. This week the pattern is words with the kn,  wr,  gh and ph pattern.  The List #6 test will be Friday, October 12th.

Science-  There will be little time for Science this week with the testing going on in the afternoon.  Students have made their skeletons and are now learning how muscles and joints work together to move our bones. The students will have a quiz on the bones we have been learning in class on Thursday, October 11. Check out the website on the blog to practice dem bones!


Third Grade Math -  We have moved into unit 2 which concentrates on solving addition and subtraction number stories. Students will be exposed to adding and subtracting with regrouping and estimating to determine if their answer  is in  "the ballpark". In addition,  students have been practicing their  0, 1, 2, 5 and 10 multiplication facts.