September 19-23

Our Community Walk is on Wednesday!  Make sure to get your child's permission slip signed and turned in by Wednesday morning. (They went home on Friday- if you did not recieve it or do not have one, let me know and I can send another one home. 

Reading
We will be starting Theme 3 this week titled "What is Light?"  During this theme we will be practicing the reading strategy of making inferences.

We will also continue to practice the strategy of asking questions.  We will begin to develop two types of questions this week, on the surface questions (answers can be found directly in the test) and under the surface questions (answers require deeper thinking). 

Reading Logs will come home again tonight in Monday folders.  Send them back next Monday or Tuesday.  This is a school-wide reading program so please make sure your child is reading regularly.

Spelling
Spelling this week will be the long vowel pattern OR the prefix poly, which means many.

Rigby Words:  ball, day, up, what, alone, quote, polite, surprise, entire, plague

Extension List:  polychromatic, polyclinic, polydactyl, polyglot, polygon, polygraph, polyhedron, polymorphous, polysyllabic, polytheism

Math
We took our Topic 2 test on Friday and will retest on Thursday.  It was a tougher topic for many so we will take some extra time to review and retest.  We will add with an expanded algorithm, look at models for adding 3-digit numbers, add 3-digit numbers, add 3 or more numbers, and draw a picture for problem solving.

Science
Our Solar Cookout was postponed until tomorrow!  There was NO sunshine on Friday, therefore we will cook our bagel pizzas and s'mores all day tomorrow.  The students will still be eating their normal lunch at school.  The cookout will count as their afternoon snack.  We will set out the cookers in the morning, check them periodically through the day to make sure the sun is hitting them correctly, and then eat our snack in the afternoon.  Our next unit will be studying the moon and stars.

Social Studies
Learning about the community is an important part of the 3rd grade curriculum.  We will culminate our communities unit with a community walk. The students will walk throughout the community, while observing things that stand out to them. They will have to draw something from their community and discuss the importance of it. We will also go to McDonald's where the students can practice using real-world skills with money.  We will be eating lunch at school and then leaving for our walk shortly afterwards.  Please send a small amount of money to school with your child that day if you would like for them to be able to buy a treat.

Writing
The students are almost finished with the stories they have been working on.  We have computers reserved to type them this week. 

Our grammar focus this week is on subjects and predicates.