Third Grade Newsletter October 15, 2007

Good day, Families

We are starting the second grading period already this week! Thank you for enthusiastically helping your child research and share information about their Asian country for social studies. The children have potential websites in their composition books and will have time to research their country in the school library as well. They will all need to practice their oral presentations at home. During this research period, your child should be collecting the information required by the rubric he/she learned about and brought home last Friday.

In reading, our primary story is a biography of a young Mexican-American boy who carries on the roping tradition taught to him by his father and grandfather. The children are practicing prediction and inference, asking questions, and categorizing with classification. These reading strategies and skills help the students be able to comprehend more about the stories they read than just what the author literally writes. As the children are reading for their additional twenty minutes a night, you can support this learning by asking them questions about why the author chose to give information without saying it directly. You can also share questions that come to your mind as you listen to the story. Those questions may or may not be answered later in the stories.

Reviewing money and making change this week, we are also starting to tell time to the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour, five minutes, and minute. It will be very important for the children to practice saying how many minutes after and how many minutes before the hour a time is. That is easy to practice in life too. Math has so many practical applications!

Spelling is review of the long o sound so the list is rather easy. Try to encourage your child to spell more of his/her words in their writing correctly, so spelling continues to move toward conventional patterns. We will be doing quick reviews of plurals and capitalization of proper nouns in writing. The most exciting event will be preparing interview questions and interviewing a person from Good Hope School that the students would like to get to know better. Additionally, each third grader will be paired with a third grader from a community in northeastern Ohio where Dr. Kimble’s daughter teaches third grade. We will start by writing about our Halloween plans. When they receive our letters, they can tell us about what they did for Halloween too. That should serve as an exciting topic for introducing one another.

Thanks to all of you for the myriad of ways you make our teaching so enjoyable. Especially, we appreciate your honoring deadlines and helping your children to be such enthusiastic, curious, skilled, responsible citizens. Have a terrific week!

Mrs. Layton, Mrs. Stellerine, and Dr. Kimble