📰 Early Light Academy – 3rd Grade Newsletter

Week of September 8-11, 2026

🌟 Dear Families,

This year at ELA, we are taking our students on a Journey to a Phoenix. 

“As an ELA Phoenix, with a growing understanding of my place in history, I can develop the Attributes, Skills, and Knowledge that fuel my journey to be a lifelong learner and inspiring leader.”

We will move through the year learning and sharing what it takes to be a Phoenix. Already, we have a competition in the lunchroom and at recess to show how we can become a Phoenix.

We are working toward earning stars for our class when students demonstrate RISE throughout the day. Once our class reaches 15 stars, we will celebrate with a special class reward! ⭐

📚 Reading 

We are switching gears to learn more about realistic fiction and ponder the question, “What can traditions teach you about cultures? What traditions does your family celebrate? What special foods do you prepare? Are there songs, stories, holidays, or celebrations that are important to your family? How does your culture contribute to your community?

During our stories this week, we will look into character perspectives and character development through stories. One of the challenges students will face is to find the author’s purpose for writing these stories. 

📚 Wonders Unit 1, Week 3: Wonders Unit 1 Week 3

🏠 Home Reading: 20 Minutes Every Day

Our expectation is that students read for a minimum of 20 minutes each day at home. Reading can look different for every child! Students may:

• Read independently.

• Read aloud to you.

• Take turns reading with you.

• Read to a sibling.

• Read to a stuffed animal. 🧸

Even 20 minutes of reading each day can make a tremendous difference. Consistent reading helps students build vocabulary, strengthen comprehension, develop fluency, and become more confident readers. It also provides an opportunity for children to discover new ideas, explore different worlds, and develop a lifelong love of reading.

Thank you for supporting your child’s reading journey at home! ❤️

📝 Grammar Focus 

This week in Grammar, we will be working with Subjects. Subjects are extremely important to add to sentences, as they tell us who the sentence is about. Students will add subjects to a sentence to complete it, as well as correct sentences so the sentence makes sense. We will also focus on adding subjects in our writing this week.

✍️  Writing Focus 

This week in writing, we will continue to focus on writing about a time in our life that was difficult and how we overcame that. Students will also work on a creative writing piece, making sure to include subjects in their sentences while adding predicates along with it. We will continue to build our foundation of a 5-sentence paragraph.

🔬Science Spotlight

This week in Science, we are continuing our unit about weather patterns. In this lesson, students explore seasonal weather conditions across different regions. They investigate how weather patterns can be used to make predictions about future weather. In the activity, Snow Fort Weather, students organize daily temperature data from three snowy towns into a table so that they can compare weather conditions and predict which town is most likely to have the best weather for a snow fort festival next year.

🔢 Math Corner:

This week, we will finish up with a hands-on rounding activity. After that, we will move into 3-digit adding and subtracting with regrouping! This is a very important topic and place value must be followed to be successful. Remind your students to stack their numbers by place value and write carefully so they can read what they do. We are seeing great effort in Math class! Encourage them to keep persevering!

🔠 Spelling Words- 

We will now be focusing on words with the silent e. A word spelled with a vowel, consonant, and final e usually has a long vowel sound. You can hear a long a in late, a long i in invite, and a long o in alone. The final e in these words is silent.

date

lake

skate

plane

grade

fine

life

rice

wise

smile

rose

globe

smoke

come

used

step

rock

luck

sneeze

stripe

📚 Vocabulary Words

• Celebrate- do something special for an important event

• Courage- bravery in a difficult situation

• Disappointment- feeling of sadness because something is not as good as expected

• Precious- very valuable to a person

• Pride- a feeling of satisfaction in something you have done

• Remind- make a person remember something

• Symbols- a thing that represents ideas or objects

• Traditions- things that have been done for a long time

• 📅 Important Dates

• September 7, 2026: Labor Day NO SCHOOL

• September. 8, 2026- Fall Pictures for students- students must be in school uniform

• September 24-25, 2026: Fall Conferences

• September 28, 2026: Teacher Comp Day, NO SCHOOL

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.