📰 Early Light Academy – 3rd Grade Newsletter

Week of October 26-30, 2026

Dear Families,

We hope you enjoyed a wonderful Fall Break! It was a great opportunity to spend time with family, relax, and enjoy a little extra free time. As we return to school, we are excited to jump right back into learning and begin another quarter of growth and discovery!

This week, we will be finalizing grades for the first quarter. As a reminder, Early Light Academy uses standards-based grading, which focuses on students' mastery of grade-level standards and their growth over time. We recognize that learning is a journey, and our goal is to help every student develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to succeed.

Throughout the first quarter, students have been introduced to many challenging concepts and have worked hard to strengthen their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. As we move forward, we will continue to provide rigorous, explicit instruction, along with the guidance, practice, and support students need to meet high expectations.

We believe every student is capable of tremendous growth, and we are committed to helping them rise to new challenges, celebrate their progress, and become confident, independent learners.

Thank you for your continued partnership in your child's education. We are looking forward to another exciting quarter of learning and growth!

Read, Relax, and Earn a Reward!

We hope your student kept their reading skills sharp over Fall Break while having fun with a good book!

The Challenge: Complete at least 7 reading activities on your Fall Break Reading Challenge form. Each activity must include at least 20 minutes of reading.

Parent Initials: After completing each activity, have a parent or guardian initial the square to verify that you completed the challenge.

Earn a Fun Reward!
Students who complete at least 7 challenges can choose one of these exciting prizes:

• A 3D-printed fidget

• A scratch-and-sniff bookmark

• Fun reading stickers

Deadline: Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Return your completed reading challenge form, with parent initials, by October 28th to earn your reward!

Fall Break Reading Challenge link

Reading 

This week, we will continue our journey into the world of historical fiction! We have enjoyed reading stories about immigration to the United States and exploring the many reasons people leave their homelands to begin new lives in a different country. These stories have provided wonderful opportunities for students to build empathy, make connections, and better understand the experiences of others.

As we read, we have been learning to identify the theme of a story and uncover the important message or lesson the author wants readers to understand. We are encouraging students to think beyond what happens in a story and consider why it matters.

One particularly challenging skill is identifying cause-and-effect relationships—understanding why events happen and how one event influences another. We will revisit and reinforce this important comprehension skill throughout the week, helping students make deeper connections within the texts they read.

Our goal is to help students become thoughtful, confident readers who not only understand what they read but can also think critically about the author's message and the relationships between events.

📖 Wonders Unit 2, Week 4: Unit 2 Week 4

Home Reading: 20 Minutes Every Day

We expect students to read for a minimum of 20 minutes each day at home. 

After your student completes their reading each day, ask them comprehension questions. 

• Asking and Generating Questions: Encourage students to ask who, what, where, when, why, and how before, during, and after reading.

• Summarizing and Retelling: Have students break a story into smaller chunks (like chapters or paragraphs) and recount the main events in their own words.

• Making Inferences: Encourage readers to use context clues and background knowledge to figure out details the author did not spell out directly.

• Visualizing: Ask students to create mental pictures of the characters, settings, and action in the story.

• Identifying Text Structure: Help students recognize how a story or informational text is organized, such as chronological order, cause and effect, or compare and contrast.

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

Grammar Focus 

This week in grammar, we are learning about combining either subject nouns or predicate nouns while using the conjunction "and" to help us. Students will also learn where to place commas correctly in sentences. They will also be able to complete an assignment for a grade where they use all of their skills from the week to combine sentences and place commas in the correct spots.

  Writing Focus 

This week in writing, we are continuing with working on our Cultural Fair projects tying in with Korea. We will be finishing our final draft writing pieces and getting our brochures ready, making sure they look ready to hang up in the hallways. Focusing on capital letters where they go, correct punctuation, correct sentence structure, beautiful handwriting, etc.

🔬Science Spotlight

We are jumping back into another science unit! For the next few weeks, we will be learning about Life Cycles. In this week's lesson, “How is Your Life Like an Alligator’s Life?,” students explore animal life cycles by thinking about their birthday buddies—all the animals that were born on the same day as they were born—and what happens to those birthday buddies over the course of their lives. In the activity, Birthday Buddies Timeline, students develop a model to compare the life stories of different animals. Using this model, students discover that although the lives of animals can be very different, they all have in common birth, growth, reproduction, and death. 

Math Corner:

We will begin quarter 2 still focusing on multiplication concepts. As we grow in multiplication, some students that are memorizing their facts may start to feel that class is getting more and more easy. We love that! This will really support them when we get to division. Don’t forget to continue to work on memorizing multiplication facts at home. Please remember to correct work and resubmit for updated grades when possible. 

✖️3rd graders MUST memorize multiplication facts for 0s-10s. We prefer through 12s. They have timed opportunities each morning to show their competency and move on to the next number. We cover the concept of multiplication in 3rd grade, but the facts MUST be done on their own. There are many resources, but writing and memorizing have proven to be most effective over the years. Students will not be able to finish the daily sheets without memorization. Students who memorize their facts historically succeed in math with less difficulty than those who still use repeated addition to count up. Please add this into your evening routines. Reach out to your student’s math teacher for more information as needed. 

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

• iReady Fluency Flight is available through your student’s portal in Classlink.com. They will sign in with Google. They use the same login 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 have access for free, I believe.

Spelling Words- 

Words with three-letter blends are the focus this week. Our spelling words will have a three-letter blend made up of three consonants at the beginning of a word.

scrubs

screams

scratch

scrape

screen

spread

splash

spray

streak

strength

strong

squeak

three

throw

thread

wrote

knife

sign

streamer

scribble

Vocabulary Words

Arrived: got to where you are going

Immigrated: to have come to a new country to live

Inspected: looked at something closely and carefully

Moment: a very short amount of time

Opportunity: a chance for good things to happen

Photographs: pictures taken with a camera

Valuable: worth a lot of money, or means a lot to someone

Whispered: spoken in a very quiet voice

Important Dates

• October 26-30, 2026: Spirit Week/Red Ribbon Week

• Monday: Wear RED/Superhero Day

• Tuesday: PJ Day

• Wednesday: Decades Day

• Thursday: Favorites Day (favorite sport/artist/hobby/color); not free dress 

• Friday: Halloween Costumes - Note: inflatable costumes may only be worn during the parade and will not be worn in class or during recess.

• October 28, 2026: Fall Break Reading Challenge Due

• October 26, 2026: Term 2 Begins

• October 30, 2026: Halloween Parade and Parties