September 13th

Post date: Sep 14, 2013 1:27:29 PM

This week in a nutshell...

Thank you for all of the book orders and thank you parents for taking the time to set up your child's online accounts this week. Please continue to give me feedback on how this works out as we begin using it for homework this week.

Writing: The students continued working on generating their first round of personal narratives. They have been brainstorming small moment stories by thinking of a person, place, or object and then listing small moment stories that are important to them. They have been working on taking their small moment idea and trying to zoom in to the most important part. This is hard work! It is also difficult to move from simply describing what happened. The goal is for the students to story tell the small moment in a way that makes the reader feel like he or she is experiencing the moment.

Reading: The 3rd graders have been working on reading non-fiction and finding text evidence to find the answers to questions. They learned how to use different text-marking strategies to track their thinking. The goal is for this to become a habit throughout the year and beyond. It will be really an extremely effective strategy when it comes to NECAP testing...

Math: We are finally wrapping up the first math unit, which reviewed 2nd grade skills. The work the students completed helped me start to figure out a lot of their strengths and weaknesses so we can delve into our first unit, which is focused on addition and subtraction skills and strategies.

Social Studies: The students have been engaged in learning experiences that build an understanding of how our government came to be a democracy. We watched some short video clips about Independence Day and read the book The Boston Tea Party by Russell Freedman and Peter Malone. As we read this, the students had some great questions, which leads us right into working with how our government works.