Another spirit day to celebrate! Crystal Lake School will have a Sports Spirit Day on Friday, February 3 to celebrate the Super Bowl! Students are encouraged to wear any sports attire and/or colors. This can be a professional sports team or a sports team that they participate on! Can't wait to see the school spirit!

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The third graders have been working toward a goal of collecting tickets for positive behavior. Their goal was 75 tickets and they earned 87! Congratulations, third graders! Students came up with ideas and suggestions and then we voted! We will be celebrating this positive behavior with a PAJAMA DAY in our classroom on Thursday, February 2. Students can come to school in their pajamas (if they wish) and be cozy all day! Please make sure students have a sole on their feet! :) This is just in our classroom only. Can't wait to see some cozy students on Thursday! Our next goal is 100 TICKETS! 

I can't believe that it is almost February. Time is flying here in our classroom. The third graders are absolutely loving Because of Winn-Dixie, a story that brings so many emotions to our hearts. We have been doing a lot of character work this unit. Students have made new friends right in their books! We have spent a lot of time getting to know our characters and noticing patterns of behavior. We have also been following characters up and down story mountains and noticing how they react to problems. We have done this work with Peter's Chair and Because of Winn-Dixie! As we have gotten to know our characters we have begun to grow theories about them. We use what we've noticed and learned about characters to develop theories and make predictions. We are coming to the end of Because of Winn-Dixie, and have noticed we are at the climax of our story! Can things get any worse for poor Opal? Ask your child to take you up and down the story mountain of their books when reading at home! 

We have been learning and sharing a lot of different strategies for addition and subtraction. Students have also been practicing rounding and estimating to the nearest ten and hundred. Students love to share their different strategies for solving different word problems. 

In the coming weeks, we will learn the standard algorithm for addition and subtraction. We will learn to use the algorithm with and without regrouping. This strategy will be the encouraged strategy to use as an efficient mathematician! 

Writers have just begun brainstorming and flash drafting persuasive writing ideas. Who knew they were so good at persuading?! :) There have been so many different ideas brainstormed and they are so exciting to read. Writers have learned that we state an opinion, support with strong reasons and then show examples/give detail to support each reason. The final product of this writing process will be a bit different than others. Students will be publishing a Digital Story for their persuasive writing. Students will create a storyboard (an outline) and then use WeVideo to create and publish a Digital Story. Students will be learning writing skills as well as video editing skills. It really is an exciting task and students in the past have loved it! Their stories really come to life when they are voiced using a video! Stay tuned as we begin to work on those. 

We also have been spending a lot of time on grammar and spelling practice. Students have been working on paying CLOSE ATTENTION to their writing, whether it is during writer's workshop or not. Capital letters and punctuation seemed to disappear so we have been working on bringing them back! If a student is not using capital letters or punctuation, they are doing the work over! We also have been learning about contractions and homophones like there, their, and they're, to, too and two, and your and you're. Students are expected to have these words spelled and used correctly in their writing! Please work with your child at home to help master this understanding. 

There have been some additional homework assignments that have come home this week. A "writing homework" packet went home yesterday for students to complete this week. Capital letters and punctuation seem to have "disappeared" in our 3rd grade classroom! So we are practicing this week at home to ensure we remember to use capitals and punctuation each time we write! The packet is to be turned in on Tuesday, January 17th. Homework has not been consistently handed in the past few weeks. Please make sure students are completing and turning in their homework. This is their responsibility! 

The second assignment that went home was an optional homework project. This project reinforces an important 3rd grade skill, elapsed time. Although this project is optional I encourage students to try it out! The project is due January 30th. The optional project for next month will be a writing research project! Stay tuned! 

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and an enjoyable week off with family. I am happy to be back and ready for the 2nd half of the school year! I sincerely apologize for being MIA the past month. The holidays and the chaos of parties, etc. going on really left me with limited time to blog. I am back to frequent updates and hope you are still reading them! 

We have started the new year off with some new units in 3rd grade. The third graders took their pre-assessment for Unit 3 today. I use this assessment to see what they already know and where the unit will take each student. Below is the link to the Family Overview Letter, which is very helpful in explaining the objectives of the unit. I encourage you to read the letter and understand what your child will be learning over the next month. 

Unit 3 Family Overview Letter

We started our new reading unit: Character Studies. Students shopped for new books and filled their book bins with plenty of new reading! During this unit our class read aloud is Because of Winn Dixie (one of my favorites)! Readers have learned that when they choose new books to read they are gaining new friends! Students will play close attention to characters throughout this unit and think about what they say, do and think and grow some sophisticated ideas about each character. In our first lesson we got to know Opal the The Preacher. We discussed what we knew (what the author told us) and then took that information and made inferences. From this, we are already growing some ideas about our new characters! Take a look at some of the students shopping and filling bins!

We are at the end of our Informational Writing Unit and almost ready to start another exciting unit! The students have been editing and revising before moving on to their publication! Students have been given a checklist tool to help them edit their work. They are on the hunt for capital letters, correct punctuation and properly spelled words! They have written some stellar books that will certainly teach you something you don't know!

We wrapped up our Social Studies unit and have just begun our Science Unit: Matter. Students reviewed Matter and the three different states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Students used a flip chart in their notebooks to write some examples of each one. As we move on, we will learn about the particles that make up matter and how matter changes! An exciting unit with some fun discovery lessons!