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!