Dear Parents:
I hope this finds everyone doing well. We enjoyed this week of celebrations in the classroom. Valentine’s Day was a great opportunity to practice being scientists as we conducted our experiment about solutions and mixtures. The children were amazed we could make lemonade, frosted cookies and trail mix as a science experiment. We also learned about area with conversation hearts and hundreds boards. For the 100th Day the children chose various activities all related to the number 100.
We tested out our unit on Ancient Rome today and will begin our unit on Mali next week. In Math this week, we continued to work on multiplication and division facts, making arrays, fact families and applying our knowledge to find the area of various rectangles. Overall the children are doing a good job with learning their facts I would like everyone to continue practicing these facts, along with their addition and subtraction facts. These learning fundamentals are an essential foundation for further math, and they need to be fully mastered. Practice for five minutes a day will help greatly. This unit will be tested out on Thursday, February 23rd.
On Thursday we spent the morning setting up our Reading Journals and working on paragraph structure. Beginning on Tuesday the children will be required to write a journal response twice a week. They can select the days of the week they want to write their responses. Once a week the children will hand in their journals to me so I can respond to their writing. This will become an ongoing conversation intended to strengthen their writing skills. Please take a few minutes reading the cover letter in the journals when they come home and have your child explain the expectations for their writing.
Thank you to those of you who have already signed up on-line for Parent Teacher Conferences. I would like to ask those who have not yet signed up, please do so before Tuesday February 21st. I will send email confirmations to everyone once I get all your preferred times. I look forward to discussing your child’s progress with you at these meetings.
I appreciate everyone’s effort to get the permission slips turned in quickly for our field trip to Imagination Stage next Friday. I also want to thank those of you who have volunteered to be chaperones. I will be in touch with you separately to share details early next week.
On Wednesday, February 22nd we will be having our annual Curriculum Day. This will be an opportunity for you to come join your child as we rotate through various curricular activities. This is a fun way for you to get a taste of some of the different Math, Science, Social Studies and Language Arts activities your child is engaged in throughout the year. This school-wide event will be from 9:30-11:30.
Two years ago, the Third Grade began a garden for the “Plot for Hunger” project. This community service project helps to grow fruits and vegetable for the AFAC food bank. As a grade level we will be planting our garden again this year. We will be planting seeds for some of our vegetables on Friday afternoon, February 24th. These seeds will be germinated inside, under the grow lights in the hallway near our room. Once it is warm enough, we will move them to the greenhouse and then transplant them in the beds outside. We will need extra hands in the coming months to help make this service project a success. If you are interested in helping please let me know. (There is no need for any garden experience to help!)
I hope everyone enjoys the long weekend break.
Upcoming Events
Monday February 20- President’s Day Holiday- No School
Wednesday, February 22- Curriculum Day
Friday, February 24- Imagination Stage
Thursday/Friday March 1-2- Parent Teacher Conferences
