Open House

Wow, thanks to all of the parents that came to Open House tonight!  It was great seeing all of you again!  I will get the treat sign up list hopefully updated tomorrow.  You will be able to click the link to the left that says Holiday Treat Sign Up if you need a reminder what you signed up for.  I will try to get reminder notes sent out the week of the party.

Other things we have been working on:

Reading:  Finding the main idea and the details of a paragraph, and soon we will be working on the main idea of a passage and the supporting details.  You can help your child by reading with him/her and helping them come up with the main idea of the story.  Help them come up with 3-5 good supporting details as well.  This is something the students will be tested on for their state assessments.

Math:  Unit 1 is complete.  That unit was mostly a review of things they covered in 2nd grade.  Unit 2 is under way and we are currently learning how to solve word problems.  We use a variety of graphic organizers to help us solve these problems.  Students will be required to know how to solve story problems for the state assessments as well.  We hope the students will use the graphic organizers to help them solve the story problems.

English:  We have been working on Sentences and sentences that are Not Sentences.  On Friday we will be having an assessment on the Subject of a sentence and the Predicate of the sentence.  Students will also be required to fix a run-on sentence and change it into two sentences.  As always we are also working on writing with capital letters and punctuation on the end.

FYI:  If you see papers that come home with NAS on them that stands for Not A Sentence.

Writing:  Monkey stories is something we have been working on the past few weeks.  We started with 4 boxes.  In the first box the students drew their monkey escaping from the zoo.  The students then had to figure out where their monkey went after the zoo.  The third box was more detail on the adventure.  The final box shows how the monkey got back to the zoo.  This was used to help the students with sequencing, which is also a reading standard.  We are currently in the writing stage.  I can't wait for the stories to be finished!  The students have really come up with some creative ideas.

Social Studies:  We are learning about landforms and how different areas have different shapes to the land.  We will also continue to work on maps and map skills.  Next time you are on a trip to KC, Wichita, or anywhere else, have your child help you read a map.  Work on directions.  Even for your trips to Topeka, you could ask your child what direction you are going now.  The more practice they get, the more it will become ingrained in their brain! :)

Handwriting:  We have finally started cursive.  Some students are very excited about this and some students are a little tentative to learn.  So far we have learned i and t.  The next couple of letters are u and w.

Other news:  We are nearing our goal of 20 Sunny D labels.  We currently have 13 of these labels!  Keep them coming!  Even after we complete our goal, I know the other two 3rd grade classes are working towards their goal of 20 as well and we would love to help each other out as much as possible!

Thanks for checking in! :)