March Newsletter

LITERACY:

Reading: Determining Importance & Summarizing

We have focused on understanding what is important versus what is interesting and unimportant, and then shown that understanding through summarizing and written explanation. The students have learned how to use the structure of Name It, Verb It, Big Idea to help write a strong topic sentence. They have also learned great ways to capture big ideas and ensure that our summaries are written in our own words. Additionally, they are making sure to add transitions so their thoughts are organized and well written.

Opinion Writing:

In writing we will continue to work on Opinion Writing. To start the unit, third graders have created bold opinions and written them in a form of a thesis statement. Students have learned that persuasive writers look at their world and imagine how it could be better to grow ideas for possible writing projects. We have looked for problems that needed to be addressed and imagined solutions. We have also found noteworthy places or people that we wanted to address. In the final bend of this unit, students will work in collaborative groups to support their causes. These groups will decide on various projects they need to create to get others to act for their cause. To finish off the unit, students will write a final piece and consider where in the world the text should go for it to reach that particular audience. This entire unit will allow our third graders to put their civic responsibility into action through writing!

MATH:

In math students will be working with multiplication and division. They will be able to use more than one way to find the product of two factors and explore the meaning behind these concepts. Students will develop their mathematical tool belt with strategies when attacking multiplication and division problems through skip counting, creating equal groups, learning math facts and creating arrays to solve problems.

SCIENCE:

Our third graders have begun a new unit on Life Science and will be finishing it up. During this unit students will try to answer questions like: How are life cycles from a variety of organisms similar and different? How does an organism change throughout its life cycle?  By the end of this unit, students will be able to use evidence to develop a scientific explanation regarding the stages of how organisms develop and change over time. We are thrilled that we have been able to have chicks for the third graders to observe so that they could have an authentic experiencing their life cycle.

We will begin our unit on rocks and minerals right before Spring Break. During this unit students will be identifying and creating a scientific explanation about the different ways that Earth materials can be broken down or combined in order to make different types of rocks and the rock cycle. We are excited for the opportunity to have an in school field trip from a visiting gemologist in order for our students to have the hands on experience of exploring rocks. In addition, we will be doing some messy and exciting experiments in class to learn about the different types of rocks and how they are formed.