Dates to remember:

1/29 - Long sleeve shirt, pants, and newspaper in labeled bag due if it has not been sent in (will be returned after Open House)
1/30 - Open House
1/31 - Remember to log in your reading minutes
2/1 - Walk to school day
2/1 - May Watts Spirit Wear Day
2/6 - Rainforest food donations are due

Reading: We will continue to work on our "Dog Unit" this week. We will be doing activities with the story Rosie, A Visiting Dog's Story by Stephanie Calmenson. The story is about a working dog named Rosie.  Rosie is a terrier whose friendly nature makes her a perfect visiting dog.  She brings comfort to people in nursing homes and hospitals.  This story is a personal narrative. We will also discuss other working dogs and how they help humans everyday.

Strategy - Summarizing- Students will learn how to summarize the key events in the story.

Vocabulary -  firm, confident, comfortable, approach, equipment, program, appointment

Grammar: Figurative Language = a play on words.
 

Spelling: With open house this week, the students do have words.  Our next pretest will be on Friday, February 1st.

Writing: This month we will be working on a variety of writing projects with a winter theme! Here are the highlights...

• Mitten writing (descriptive writing) - Students will design a mitten and then write a description of their mitten. Will their description be good enough for someone to pick their mitten out of a bunch of mittens? Close attention to details and creative use of adjectives will be necessary.
• The Snowman Caper! (point of view writing)- In this assignment, students will practice writing from different points of view. The students will develop a story about a child's missing snowman. They will tell the story from either the snowman's point of view, the child's, a newspaper reporter covering the story of the missing snowman or a detective investigating the crime. It will be tons of fun listening to the various points of view!
• Frosty gets a Makeover! (creative/persuasive writing)- This will be a group effort. Students are given the task of updating Frosty's look. What kind of hat will Frosty don in 2013? Groups will design a new, hip, up-to-date look for Frosty in the form of an advertisement. In addition, the students will compose a new song to go along with Frosty's makeover. Each group will present their proposed look to the class and everyone will vote on which is the best new look and song for Frosty! Creativity at it's best:)

Science: We will continue our in-depth study of tropical rainforests. Students will find out where they are located and identify the 4 layers. In addition, students will have computer lab time to work on their animal slide presentation.

Rainforest in a bottle project - The students will be creating their own rainforest on Tuesday, January 29.  They will be using a 2 liter bottle, soil, gravel, a plant, and other items to create this project.

Math:

Third Grade Math- We are working on Unit 4 which covers multiplication and division. Students will be expected know that multiplication is repeated addition and division is repeated subtraction. In addition, students will be expected to solve word problems in situations involving equal groups, arrays and measurement quantities. Should learn to solve these problems in a variety of ways such as drawing pictures, an equation with a symbol for the unknown number, using math facts and drawing arrays.

Vocabulary - array, associative property, commutative property, distributive property, dividend, divisor, factor, product, quotient.

Accelerated Math - We are working on Unit 5 which focuses on place value of very large numbers and multi-digit multiplication. This week, we will go over different multiplication methods. We will start by teaching partial products to solve a single digit by multi-digit multiplication problem. Then we will move on to multi-digit by multi-digit multiplication. By the end of the week, we will cover traditional and lattice multiplication. Encourage your child to bring home their SRB's to review the partial products method.