Week 20
Class Notes:
Last Thursday was Half-Way Day. The 3rd graders have made tremendous growth this semester and will spend some time reflecting on their hard work, improvements and new goals. Progress reports will be sent home on Monday, February 3rd.
Congratulations to our amazing 3rd graders. Last week our class won the School-Wide Activity: Classroom Cleanup Challenge!
We will continue to explore Mystery Stories during Readers' Workshop. 3rd Graders will learn that readers think about clues they might have missed in the beginning or middle of a mystery. When you finish a mystery book, look back and see if there were any clues that you missed.
In Writer's Workshop, we will write persuasive speeches with big, bold ideas to grab our audience's attention. We will come up with strong reasons to support our ideas and use examples to convince our readers. We’ll also learn how to organize our speeches with a clear beginning, middle, and end. By sharing our work with classmates and making improvements, we will create speeches that are fun and convincing!
In Fundations, we will complete Unit 8 this week; the assessment will be on Friday. Link to Family Resources Unit 8.
Math lessons will focus on relating division to the unknown factor in a multiplication equation. For example, the quotient in 30÷6= is the unknown factor in ___×6=30. Students use this insight and their knowledge of multiplication facts to identify division facts. To develop fluency, students reason about patterns in a multiplication table and notice that multiplication is commutative. For instance, if they know the value of 4×7, they also know that of 7×4. Students also reason about the product of two factors by decomposing one of the factors. For instance, to find the value of 7×3, they can decompose the 7 into 5 and 2 and find the value of 5×3)+(2×3). This line of reasoning develops students’ intuition for the distributive property of multiplication.
In science, we will build circuits with switches so students can explore how lights and other electronic devices turn on and off.
Cursive Letters: We will continue to learn how to write in cursive. This week's letters are the letters h and t.
Looking ahead... To complement our study of Massachusetts, we will be taking a trip to the Commonwealth Museum on Tuesday, March 18th. Please sign and return your child's permission slip and check out the instructions for online payment.
Repeat Announcements:
Media: Our book swapping day is on Wednesdays--please help your child remember to return their library books.
Thank you Mr. Mathison, last week's Mystery Reader. Would you like to volunteer as our next Mystery Reader? Click HERE to sign up.
Special Subject Schedule
Monday -- Spanish and Art
Tuesday -- P.E.
Wednesday -- Media
Thursday -- Music and P.E.
Friday -- Spanish
Important Dates
Wednesday, January 28th - Chinese New Year
Wednesday, February 5th - Early Release Day; 12:15 dismissal
Monday, February 17 - 21st - February Break
Monday, February 24th- classes resume
Monday, March 31st - ELA MCAS, session 1
Tuesday, April 1st- ELA MCAS, session 2
Thursday, May 8th- Math MCAS, session 1
Friday, May 9th- Math MCAS, session 2
Created 1/2025
Jennifer_ramras@needham.k12.ma.us