Newsletter
Field Trip: Field trip permission slips will come home today, and are due back by Friday, May 3rd with payment. The third grade will visit the Concord Museum to learn what life was like for the people during colonial times. Students will create pierced tin plates to bring home and explore the colonists’ clothing, possessions and learn a dance. The cost of the field trip for students is $10.00. Checks should be made out to FSS. Each class will bring four chaperones. Due to seating on the bus, chaperones will need to provide their own transportation to and from the museum. If you’re interested in attending the field trip, please send me an email by May 3rd. If I have more than four volunteers, I will draw names to determine who we’ll bring. The cost for chaperones is $13.00.
MCAS: On Thursday, May 9th and Monday, May20th third graders will take the Math test. It’s important that students get a good night's sleep and eat a good breakfast. Although we’ll have a short snack prior to the start of the test, there will be no scheduled snack time during the testing sessions. If you want to send your child in with gum or a piece of hard candy to help them concentrate, please send it to school in a labeled baggy. I will be collecting their labeled bags when they arrive at school. If students had leftover candy or gum from previous sessions, I will pass that out to them. When students finish the session they are allowed to read. We are encouraging students to bring in books from home that they will enjoy reading if they should have time when their testing session is over. If they are at the end of a book they should have a second book ready if the need arises.
Reading- Prior to vacation, we began our biography unit. It’s important for students to look at the significant people that they’re reading about from a historical lens, and therefore we’ll continue to spend some time looking at a timeline of American history from the 1600’s- 1960’s. In doing so, we’ll read stories that have been set throughout these time periods, and then discuss what life was like during these times and the hardships and challenges that people faced.
An important goal of the third grade biography unit is for the children to learn about the lives of a person, to identify the influences that this person has made on lives today, and to make connections between causes and effects.
Writing - Over the next month, we’ll be reading a Who Was book and taking notes as we read in preparation for our culminating Pop Bottle project and Google slideshow. During class students will take notes on the significant events of the person’s life and then organize their notes using the box and bullet format to create well developed informational paragraphs. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll send additional information out to families about the Pop Bottle project that will be completed at home.
Math- This week we will continue to work on Geometry. In Unit 6, we have been studying shapes, specifically quadrilaterals, as well as area and perimeter. In addition, we will revisit and review our previously learned skills this year in math as we practice and acquaint ourselves with the Math MCAS format.
Science--This week in science,we will be starting our next unit on Circle of Life. In this unit, students compare and contrast the life cycles of both animals and plants. Students create models to build an understanding that all organisms share certain stages in their life cycles: birth, growth, reproduction, and death. Students also explore how an understanding of life cycles can aid in solving problems that occur when there are too many or too few organisms in a particular environment.
Social Studies--We have finished up learning about the Pilgrims & Puritans and their way of life and discussed how changes were happening in the colonies. Over the next few weeks we will be learning about Massachusetts in the American Revolution. Our big questions will be, How did people and events in Massachusetts help create our nation? As part of our discussion we will be looking at the timeline of events that led up to the American Revolution. Some key topics will be, The Boston Massacre, The Tea Act & The Boston Tea Party, The “Intolerable” Acts. Some key vocabulary words are: boycott, protest, revolution, tax, declaration, and independence.
Homework- In order to grow as readers and mathematicians it’s important that students dedicate 30 minutes each night Monday- Thursday on homework.
Reading 20 minutes a day at home is important. This could be done daily or as a total of 80 min. per week. We want the students to choose high interest, “good fit books.” The goal of reading daily is not only to grow as a reader, but also to instill the love of reading. We don’t assign students books to read at home, but trust that they’re choosing a book that they enjoy, and will help them develop reading for meaning skills and further develop their vocabulary.
Math fact fluency is the building block for higher level math concepts, and by the end of third grade students should know by memory all products of two one-digit numbers (3.0A7). Students should spend 10 minutes each night practicing their multiplication facts up to 10x10. Math fact fluency also helps students solve more complex math problems more quickly. If they have mastered their math facts, these concepts will be significantly easier, and they will be better equipped to solve them at a more efficient speed. The benchmark for trimester one is that students will “Know from memory all products of factors 0,1,2,5,9 and 10.” They can practice in a number of ways. Traditional flash cards, reciting facts aloud, writing them on paper, or using an online program. We suggest that students start with 0, 1, 2, 5, 9, and 10.
In school we’ll use the AR program and Xtra math program to track their weekly progress.
AR- We use Accelerated Reader as a way to monitor engaged reading time and comprehension. It also allows us to personalize students' reading goals so students are motivated to read and they can check their own progress. Students shouldn’t be reading for “points,” but rather choosing books they will enjoy reading at their level, and therefore, finish many books and achieve points along the way. The goals that are set for each student have been differentiated to meet their learning needs and are adjusted throughout the trimester as students meet their goal. As long as they’re reading at home and in school, the points will be a natural progression.
**Students can take AR quizzes at home for books that they are reading at home. They will need to log into their school google accounts to do this. Please see the helpful directions for logging into school google account and AR on this link or on the classroom website.
Xtra Math- In math we use the online fact program XtraMath to monitor their progress. It is an online fact fluency program that helps students develop quick recall and automaticity of their basic math facts. Although it is a timed fluency program, we remove the visual timing elements from the screen so that students are not distracted or become anxious by this. Within the program, students have 3 seconds to type an answer. If this is not completed, the program reinforces their learning by giving the correct answer, having students read the correct answer, and typing it in before moving on. We will be introducing this program next week and having each student take the placement quiz to determine their initial fluency score. Once the placement quiz is completed, each day students will be given a two minute progress quiz to check what progress they have made. Based on this progress quiz students are given an individualized set of 10 facts for the students to work on. Spaced repetition is used to solidify knowledge of these particular facts. Students are asked to complete a full round of XtraMath each day, which is 10 minutes or less. Students with a strong foundation of basic math facts will have an easier time when they begin to tackle more advanced math, like fractions or algebra in the higher grades.