Week 2

Reminders: First day packet forms are due Friday, September 2.
We have a school holiday, Monday, September 5.  We hope you will have a safe and fun Labor Day weekend.

Reading: We will continue to build routines and establish expectations for Reader's Workshop. This week students will continue to talk about our thinking while we read.  Students will participate in discussions on: What was the story about?  How do you know if you have picked a good book? What do you do when you get hung up on something in your book?  How can you track your thinking while you read?

Teachers will begin pulling students for reading assessments.  This time with your student helps us get to know them a bit more as a reader.  Please know that reading teachers will pull all 40 students for assessments during the month of September.  You do not need to prep your child for this reading time.  The assessment will give us a good look at a starting point for our instruction and guide our creation of small groups.

Classes will get to the library for the first time this week.  Our schedule is below.  We hope that many of you will volunteer in the library and help us navigate our way to great books!

Badrack/Jackson- Tuesdays at 12:40

Duncan/Ford- Wednesdays at 9:00

Rozzell/Scott- Thursdays at 9:00

Writing:  It was a pleasure to watch your children build their Writer's Notebooks this week.  It was a wonderful opportunity for us to get to know each other better and for the storytelling and sharing to begin!  This week in writing we will continue to build anchors and lists of stories we might be able to share.  Students will generate ideas and practice focused storytelling in partners before moving to writing in their journals.  
We'd love you help at home!  Cultivate a culture of storytelling at home.  Everyone LOVES a good story.  Stories we love to hear have a point and share an event we have in common with those around us or an interesting event that has made an impact on who we are.

Word Work:  This week we will administer the Words Their Way Inventory.  This assessment will be given three times throughout the school year to track students progress and developmental understanding of how words and spelling patterns work.  This assessment is not graded.  It will be used for information to help develop lessons and small groups that will target your child's learning needs.

Social Studies: We will introduce our Social Studies resources to students this week.  They will work to build their Social Studies resource folder and journal.  We will also use our story sharing in Writing to continue to build our classroom community.

Math:Last week in math we learned about classroom procedures and routines. We began reviewing some second grade skills. This week we will continue working on standard form, word form, and expanded form on numbers up to 100,000. 

This week we will be discussing in greater depth the value of each place.  The students will be taught strategies on how to compare and order numbers using the greater than and less than sign.  We will be introducing some new Math Station games to the kids to practice these skills as well. Last week, I encouraged your child to begin practicing their math facts every night or five minutes. The class blog has some great websites to practice - you can find these under the Math Websites page on the right side of the blog.

Science: We skimmed the surface in Science last week.  The kids made a title page and table of contents for their Science Journal and decorated them with Science Icons.  On Thursday we talked about “What is a Scientist?” We discovered all the different types of Scientists that exist and began working on our first project.  In Science next week we will be going through Lab Safety procedures and learning the names of many Science tools.  On Tuesday,  we will take a gallery walk with a partner and work on categorizing tools by tools that are used for observation, safety, measurement, or recording.

Writing- Writing workshop has been a fun and exciting way to get to know one another the last few days.  We will focus this year on sharing our stories.  Last week we started story sharing and taking turns listening to one another's stories.  This week we will create some resources that we will use this year in Writer's Workshop when we are trying to figure out what story to write! Students will spend a few days this week creating their own heart map.  Our heart maps remind us what people, things, and places we love.  These  will help prompt and promote storytelling and writing.  Ask your student what they placed in their hearts!!

Reading- We've been talking about our reading for days!  Students have been helping each other understanding the difference between real reading and fake reading.  We've started to focus on our thinking while we read.  We've even started to share our thinking and all this thinking about thinking is what we call metacognition. 

Students have been practicing this skill with our read alouds and their independent reading books.  We will continue practicing this skill this week and begin talking about what good readers can do when they get stuck on an idea in a book that doesn't make much sense.

Social Studies- We spent last week creating classroom community. Our study will more to focus on our greater communities and citizens who have served as great role models.  Students will be introduced to Ruby Bridges, Helen Keller and Jane Addams.  We will look at what they did to help their community in the past and how that impacts our communities today.  Students will also be encouraged to start thinking about character traits that a "good citizen" would display.

Homework-Third graders will have 20 minutes of reading homework each night.  We will start our library schedule this Wednesday.  Students should record the book title in their planner each night to show that the required 20minutes was completed.