📰 Early Light Academy – 3rd Grade Newsletter

Week of March 9-13, 2026

🌟 Dear Families,

We are moving into that time of year when we have made it through the long stretch of February and are looking ahead to Spring Break. While the break is exciting, it’s important that we continue to stay focused. Our learning is still in full swing, and students are continuing to grow in all areas of school.

Please do your best to limit absences and tardies during this time. Because our schedule is very full, we often do not have time to reteach material that students miss. When this happens, students can feel frustrated when they return and find it difficult to understand concepts that were taught while they were away. Your support in helping students attend school regularly makes a big difference.

📖 Reading Focus: Review Week

We are wrapping up Unit 4 of our Wonders reading curriculum. Students explored the essential questions: How can you use what you know to help others? How can animals adapt to the challenges in their habitat? and How can others inspire us?

Students will be taking the Unit 4 assessment, which covers the skills we’ve practiced over the past five weeks. These include finding text evidence, comparing and contrasting, identifying a character’s perspective, explaining character development, using text features, recognizing figurative language, and reading different types of poetry. 

📝 Grammar Focus 

This week we will not be learning new concepts so this is a great time to review concepts we have learned in this unit. Review with your child linking verbs which connect our subject to the predicate, contractions using not and helping them see which letters are replaced with the apostrophe. We also looked at main and helping verbs with a main verb telling what the subject is or does and the helping verb helps the main verb show action. We also explored complex sentences and the difference between independent and dependent clauses. Finally we looked at irregular verbs. This is a great time to review these concepts!

✍️  Writing Focus 

This week in writing we are continuing with expository writing. Students will be creating an expository essay based on what skills firefighters need to do their job and why it is important for them to have those skills. We want to make sure students have a topic sentence, three strong details that have evidence from the text supporting it and a strong conclusion.

🔬Science Spotlight

This week in science we are starting a new unit about weather and climate! In this unit, students will explore weather and climate patterns. They will make predictions about the weather through careful observations of the clouds, wind, temperature, and precipitation. Students will also learn to differentiate between weather and climate and use models to reveal global climate patterns. They will use this information to design solutions that reduce the impacts of severe weather events like windstorms.

✖️Math Corner: Understanding equivalent fractions

This week we will be continuing our work on equivalent fractions! Please keep working on multiplication facts at home and talk with your student's teacher about any Math concerns with fractions! Our students are AMAZING!!!

🔠 Spelling Words- As this is a review week, there are no new spelling words. Have your child practice past spelling patterns.: variant vowels /ü/ and /ů/, oo as in spoon, ew as in chew, u_e as in tube, ue as in due, u as in July, ui as in fruit, ou as in soup. Tell students that the vowel sound /ů/ can be spelled oo, as in book, and ou, as in could., vowel digraphs, or teams, such as ea, ee, ai, ie, ay, ow, ey, oe, and oa, variant vowel /ô/, aw as in straw; au as in haul; al as in salt and walk; all as in ball; ough as in bought; a as in water, and r, the r changes the vowel’s sound.

In a word that has more than one syllable, both the vowel and the letter r appear in the same syllable because they act as a team to make the vowel sound., homophones, plurals, and soft c and g.

📚 Vocabulary Words

1. Adventurous-willing to risk danger for excitement

2. Courageous-brave

3. Extremely- very

4. Weird-strange or mysterious

5. Free verse-poem that does not rhyme or follow a rhythmic pattern

6. Narrative poems- a poem that tells a story

7. Repetition- using the same word several times in a poem

8. Rhyme- words that end with the same sound

📅 Important Dates

• Friday, March 13: Dress-down day

• Friday, March 13: Yearbook Orders due

• March 9-13: College Week 

• March 12: Wear college shirts or hats. You must have uniform bottoms. 

I've had some parents reach out letting me know they've struggled with the links, so I've copied and pasted them below. Hopefully this helps!

• Quizlet multiplication flash cards: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kQ1jdLL2Qc8TOur9--J8i3SddQaT-yTo2niYB3qzQko/edit?usp=sharing

• Khan Academy steps to login at home: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11c0eFvAk-j0QMoA0N-Jwt1pdgcdlZK2bu3u-0iJ_pDk/edit?usp=sharing

Here are some websites you can use to practice math skills. 

• iReady Flight Fluency available through your student’s portal in Classlink.com  They will use sign in with Google. They use the same log in as they do in school. You may have to add @earlylightacademy.org to their Google login

• Multiplication.com

• https://www.boddlelearning.com/parents-page

• https://xtramath.org/#/signin/teacher_other

• https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/parents

• https://www.boddlelearning.com/parents-page

• https://play.stmath.com/academy/modules/hs_started/ if you sign up as a homeschool student you can get free access to ST math. Your student should be familiar with this math program from years past.

https://www.purchaseyearbook.com/

Use code: EarlyLightElemYB26