3rd Grade
Home Base

Dear Parents,

We thank all the parents who made the “Cuckoo Clock” a collaborative activity. Thanks for all the fancy decorations, third graders had heaps of fun. The Fall Festival will absolutely be a great success with all your support and collaboration.

Our young writers are getting ready for their literacy celebration that will take place in November and they are now working on editing, revising, and the author’s craft. We couldn’t be prouder to see how determined and curious our young writers are, going beyond their boundaries in terms of including new ideas and new vocabulary. In their essays, they continue to generate strong bold opinions, claims or statements. In addition, they are working on providing evidence to support these bold claims. In your conversations at home we would like to prompt parents to ask their children to share their bold claims and opinions about the stories they read. You may apply this thinking routine “What made you say that?” This will help them develop their critical thinking skills.

In mathematics, as we continue to explore mathematical strategies to solve multi-step problems, we conceptually explore equal groups, arrays, number lines, Hundreds Tens Ones (HTO), and measurement quantities. In addition, we have started exploring the area model for multiplication to illustrate the distributive property of multiplication. The area model for multiplication is a visual method that helps students understand how to multiply numbers by breaking them into smaller, more manageable parts. It uses the concept of area (length × width) to represent the product of two numbers. Students divide the numbers into tens and ones (or other place values), draw a rectangle, and label the sides with these parts. By calculating the area of each smaller section and then adding them together, students can see how multiplication works, reinforcing their understanding of place value and number sense. This model makes complex multiplication problems easier to solve and understand!