Important dates:
May 1 - Progress Report Distribution
May 5 - Cinco de Mayo Dress Down Day (red, white, green)
May 25 - Memorial Day (no classes)
June 4 - Last Day of School
Room Temperatures - As the temperatures fluctuate, please keep in mind that our huge school building can take several hours to get to a comfortable temperature (especially after the weekends). Please send your child in layers so they can add or subtract articles as needed. That will also be helpful as we begin having outdoor recess again.
Headphones - If you haven't yet, please send your child to school with headphones to help them focus on their digital activities. Thank you to everyone who has sent them!
Specials Classes - Our class will now have World Language with Mr. Lopez each afternoon until the end of the school year.
Students are allowed and encouraged to bring bottles of water to school. In the classroom, students are only allowed to have water (no juice or soda). We have many spills throughout the year and cleanup can be difficult when we find that it isn't just water - especially when electronics are involved. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Student Wellness Good attendance is wonderful, but our health is much more important. If your child is experiencing symptoms of illness but will still attend classes, please send them in a mask to help protect their classmates from transmission of the various illnesses that tend to grow in numbers this time of year.
Student Uniform and Dress Down Days Students should come to school in uniform Monday through Friday. Proper uniform consists of navy blue pants/skirt/dress/collared shirt. Gray Edwards sweatshirts and t-shirts (when students have PE) are also allowed. Additionally, our classroom can get very cold so please provide your child with a navy blue sweater with no hood. Principal-approved dress down days will be announced ahead of time.
As always, please feel free to contact me via Remind with any questions you might have.
Unit 4 of our Second Step Program is all about "Problem Solving." These activities are meant to help your child grow as a person as they navigate life.
The weekly lessons are: Step by STEP, Say the Problem, Think and Explore, Pick a Solution, and Solving a Problem.
With adult support, students learn how to apply their emotion management, communication, and empathy skills to solve interpersonal problems and demonstrate strategies for effectively dealing with interpersonal conflict.
Encourage your child to explore different options for problem solving or finding compromise.
Module 10, Tell a Tale, asks this question:
Why is it important to pass stories down to the next generation?
Throughout this module, students will listen to, read, and view a variety of texts and media that present them with information about stories that are worth retelling.
A genre focus on tales provides students with opportunities to identify author's craft, theme, and figurative language in order to better understand unfamiliar texts. Students will also encounter narrative poetry and opinion texts to build knowledge across genres.
As students build their vocabulary and synthesize topic knowledge, they will learn more about how people pass their culture's tales from one generation to another.
Performance Task: Students will work collaboratively to research stories and compose some of their own.
ominously, pungent, tempting, quantities, snickered, upcoming
Shades of Meaning
Each day, from Monday through Thursday, students will be asked to complete one Choice Board activity for homework in their spelling notebooks. They can choose any activity they would like as long as it is different from the others they've chosen during that week.
Each week, students will receive a new spelling sort. These are words that we would normally be practicing (and tested on) in the classroom. Being able to correctly spell these words will be important as they develop as writers and students should practice every day.
Students have been assigned varying spelling sorts according to their ability.
There will be a test on Friday.
This Week - Students will have spelling homework on Monday - Thursday. Students should also have completed 5 times each and sentences for 10 of their words (classwork).
There are many math concepts visited in third grade but only certain ones are expected to be "mastered" by the time the year ends. We will spend our remaining weeks making sure that your child has a solid grasp of the following skills:
Multiplication & Division: Represent and solve problems involving equal groups, arrays, and measurement quantities.
Fluency: By year-end, they should know from memory all products of two one-digit numbers (up to 10 X 10).
Properties: Apply the Commutative, Associative, and Distributive properties (e.g., knowing that 8 X 5 = 40, so 5 X 8 = 40).
Two-Step Word Problems: Solve problems using all four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and use a letter for the unknown quantity (e.g., 15 + a = 20).
Unit Fractions: Understand 1/b as one part of a whole partitioned into "b" equal parts.
Number Line: Place fractions correctly on a number line.
Equivalence: Recognize and generate simple equivalent fractions (e.g., 1/2 = 2/4).
Comparison: Compare two fractions with the same numerator or the same denominator using symbols (<, >, =).
Time: Tell and write time to the nearest minute and solve "elapsed time" word problems.
Mass & Volume: Measure and estimate liquid volumes (Liters) and masses (Grams/Kilograms).
Area: Understand area as an attribute of plane figures and relate it to multiplication (Area = length X width).
Perimeter: Distinguish between linear measures (perimeter) and area measures.
Multi-digit Arithmetic: Fluently add and subtract within 1,000.
Rounding: Use place value to round numbers to the nearest 10 or 100.
Shapes: Categorize shapes (like quadrilaterals) based on their attributes (sides, angles).
*Students should also study multiplication and division facts independently throughout the year.
There is an astounding diversity of traits among organisms living in different environments on Earth. How do the traits of different organisms make them more likely or less likely to survive in their environments? What happens to organisms when their environment changes?
In the Environments and Survival unit, students assume the role of biomimicry engineers studying a population of grove snails to understand how the snails’ traits influence their survival in a changing environment. Students apply what they learn to plan, make, and test designs that solve problems. Reporting to the lead engineer at an engineering firm, students work to explain why the snails with yellow shells in the population aren’t surviving as well as the snails with banded shells.
Why?
Young people and adults have many misconceptions about the factors that affect the survival of organisms in their environment, particularly when an environment undergoes a change. While the understanding that animals have needs they must meet to survive is likely familiar to students, the critical roles of the environment and of the specific traits of organisms in influencing organisms’ survival are likely less familiar. In this unit, students examine different factors that make organisms more likely or less likely to survive: the ability of organisms to meet their needs in a given environment, how different traits make it easier or harder for specific organisms to survive in an environment, and how this pattern of survival changes when the environment changes.
In this unit, students explore the concept of community and place, and how they shape and define students’ own identities, including their racial, ethnic, cultural, environmental, personal, and community identities. They will investigate the physical and political features of geography in global, regional, and local contexts.