March 12-16, 2012

Important Dates:

3/12-3/16:  Book Fair is here!!!  Students can purchase books throughout the week.  It will also be open during the Fun Fair.
3/17:  Fun Fair and Book Fair  11am-3pm
3/20:  No school

 Reading

The students are going to be working on Functional Reading passages for the next two weeks.  Functional reading passages are very important in everyday life.  We will explain that there are many forms of these passages, such as newspapers, recipes, advertisements, and more.  The students will learn how to spot important vocabulary and facts in the passages.  We will teach this unit by modeling for the students, practice together, and then allow them to work on their own.

Writing
The students will begin a unit on Personal Narratives.  We will emerge the students in various samples of this type of writing and form a list of things that are needed in personal narratives.  Personal narratives are often one of the first types of writing that you do.  Personal narratives allow you to share your life with others and experience the things that happen around you. The job of the writer is to put the reader in the midst of the action letting him or her live through an experience.  You write about yourself and experiences that you have encountered, read, or heard about. You can become much more engaged when you write about yourself in personal narratives because you are the expert on the topic of your life.  The students’ job will be to make the story interesting - as interesting for the reader as it was for them when it happened. Lots of description, lots of action, and lots of dialogue will help the reader feel what the author felt.

Spelling

The pattern for this week, list #21, is compound words.  Compound words are when two words are joined together to create a new word.  This week our spelling test will be on Friday, March 16th.

Science

We are beginning our new unit on The Moon.  The students will learn many things about the moon.  The students will learn about the characteristics of the moon, how craters are created, and will be able to compare and contrast the moon with the Earth and the sun.  The students will also gain a better understanding of the terms rotate and revolve, which describe the moon’s movements.  Check out the links about the moon on our blog!  They have great information for the students reinforce what we are learning in the classroom.

Third Grade Math

Unit 7 is a shorter unit and extends the basic multiplication and division skills the students learned in the first half of the year.  The skills developed in this unit are important for many other concepts in math, such as estimation and multi-digit multiplication and division.  The students will review multiplication and division patterns, extend their basic multiplication facts, and practice making estimations of costs.

Accelerated Math

We will continue to work on Unit 7 which focuses mostly on fractions.  We will also work on some probability.