Parent-teacher conferences are quickly approaching. Conferences are scheduled for November 30-December 2. Students will be dismissed at 12:00 on these days. Please check your emails! I have sent an email with a link to the conference sign-up. The link can also be found below! I look forward to seeing you soon! 

Conference Sign-Up

Happy November! We have a lot going on in our classroom! We've had birthdays, Halloween, books, wallets and all sorts of stuff going on! 

Students worked hard all week to fancy up and finish their published small moment piece. We will be celebrating all of our hard work with a writing celebration tomorrow. Students will have a chance to share their stories and any challenges or proud moments! Writing and any other work from this unit will be coming home next week with a letter. We are moving into Informational Writing for our next unit! 

We started our new math unit-Introduction to Multiplication. Students have been introduced to beginning concepts of multiplication. Our focus at the beginning of this unit is to help students see the relationship between multiplication and repeated addition. We look at our repeated addition equations and we recognize that we are adding a certain number a specific number of times. For example, 4+4+4 is the same thing as 4 x 3. Students have spent a few days figuring out how much groups of stamps cost! 

We can't forget about Halloween! We had a fun time using CANDY CORNS and pretzels as math manipulatives. Students solved word problems that involved getting witches to their parties and figuring out how many could fit on a broom. They loved it and showed such sophisticated mathematical thinking! 

We have concluded our reading unit and finished Stone Fox. The ending had us feeling A LOT of different emotions. The author really took a twist at the end of the story! Readers talked about the different emotions we have when we read. Before we move on to our Informational Reading Unit we had to celebrate all of our hard work! Students celebrated by creating their own bookmarks with strategies. Students added strategies that help them be a stronger reader. We are going to laminate them and they will be able to see their strategies each time they open their book! 

The next exciting thing  is our Social Studies project. Students have been studying Ellington, past and present. In this unit we also learned what it means to be an economist and we brainstormed some of the goods and services offered right here in Ellington! We have decided to open up a "Mock Economy" in our very own classroom. Students chose to work independently or in a group and they have pitched a business plan to me. Students are either offering a good or a service to their classmates. Each student is starting off with $100 in their fancy, homemade wallets! They will be required to pay rent to me each month and will have to pay to start up their business. There will be time when the market is open and students will be able to act as both producers and consumers. Students are extremely excited about this and I can't wait to see all the fun AND learning as we open our market each week! Ask your child about their good or service! 
Here they are making their wallets and planning their business. They came out SO good!

We will be having our Harvest Party on November 22 at 1:00pm. If you are interested in volunteering, and I haven't emailed you, please send me an email ASAP! 

Friday, October 28 is a Crystal Lake School Spirit Day! Wear your CLS spirit wear or colors (blue, white, orange)! Can't wait to see you! 

Below is an overview of Unit 2. This is the next unit we will be learning in 3rd grade. I encourage you to take a peek at it. There are some friendly examples for parents to understand the what/how of our upcoming unit! 

Unit 2 Overview

Good evening! I hope you all are having a wonderful week. A quick update on the learning in Room 165! We are coming to the end of all of our current units! So exciting! We just took our Unit 1 Post-Assessment for our current math unit. Be on the lookout for Unit 1 assessments/work coming home in the next week. We will be beginning Unit 2 in the next few days. This unit will introduce multiplication. Students will take a Unit 2 Pre-Assessment this week to show their understanding of the unit skills. We are very excited! 

Our Number Corner has been really exciting this month! We have been observing an interesting pattern of shapes this month. Students have learned about different kinds of quadrilaterals (parallelogram, trapezoid). Some important vocabulary this month has been: parallel, congruent, polygon. Students have also learned about right angles and lines of symmetry. Each day we look for these important attributes of each shape. We have some fantastic mathematical observations each day! We are also very excited to watch how many liters we are collecting. Each day we collect 250mL and add it to our total liter. So far we have collected 4 liters (4,000mL). Next week we will have a whole new Number Corner for November! :) 

Our readers are wrapping up their first reading unit. We have spent the last week working on predicting, retelling and tackling tricky words! We all know what it's like to be stuck on a tricky word. We have some great strategies in our toolbox that we can reach for! Our next unit will switch gears a bit and we will begin reading non-fiction texts! 

We have had a lot of fun studying Ellington. We spent a few days observing different kinds of maps that showed Ellington in different ways. We looked at a county map, a state map, Google map, zoning map and a farmland map. All of these maps represented Ellington as a town. Students learned that Ellington is in the county of Tolland. 

We are so excited to be celebrating all of the learning over the past several weeks. We are growing each day!

Happy Friday! Although it was a short week we had a lot going on in Room 165! Today we had our Fire Prevention Assembly. The Crystal Lake Fire Department came to teach us about being safe if there were ever a fire. We also got to check out the fire truck! Our classmates, Julia and Jillian were the winners of the Fire Prevention Poster Contest! Congratulations! 

Not only did we have Fire Prevention, but we had Mr. Greenwood visit our classroom as the Mystery Reader. He came in his police uniform to teach us all about being a police officer. We got to meet his D.A.R.E lion, ask questions and learn about the duties of a police officer. Thank you, Mr. Greenwood for teaching us! 

Our readers are growing each day! We learned to stop and give ourselves a comprehension check to be sure we are understanding our Just Right books. We also learned that we need to be aware of the thinking our book is telling us to do- should we be envisioning or thinking about information the book is giving us? This helps us understand the text. We got to read a few more chapters of Stone Fox and we are left at a cliffhanger! Will Grandfather survive? Will he talk? The suspense is killing us!

Today we did our Fact Frenzy Friday! Mathematicians used their addition strategies to work on their fact fluency. Students saw their growth from their last fact frenzy! How exciting! Keep practicing those facts!

We've also learned about the word, efficient. We use it a lot during math as we are becoming efficient mathematicians. We want to get to the answer in the most efficient ways! Ask your child about their efficient strategies. 

HAVE A MARVELOUS WEEKEND!

 

UPCOMING NOTICES

Scholastic Book Orders will be coming home tomorrow. They will be due on October 21. You can send the order back to school or place it online! 

Also, a letter will be coming home tomorrow from Ms. Cannon about ordering recorders. Wahoo! I have also attached a copy of the letter below.

Recorder Order Form

I just want to start off by saying THANK YOU for all the donated materials that have been coming in. It is so helpful to have all these donations and we all appreciate your generosity!

Third graders have been working hard here in Room 165! Students have been reading their books like they are GOLD. We have no curmudgeons here in 3rd grade! :) We even treat our reading partners like GOLD as we share our stories with one another. We also spent some time discussing what makes a book too easy, too challenging and JUST RIGHT! Readers have been shopping and filling their bins with "Just Right" books. Each day we are building our stamina to become STRONGER readers! We are absolutely loving the BFG as we participate in the Global Read Aloud!

We have spent a lot of time this week working with Problem Strings and learning new strategies. Students have had so much fun working through these strategies and then sharing their work with classmates. We have some super efficient mathematicians in here! We also have spent some time discussing a very important 3rd-grade skill- the EQUAL sign! Students are beginning to learn and understand what the equal sign represents in an equation. We are loving our new October Number Corner which focuses on geometric shapes. Today we started collecting milliliters and liters in our calendar collector! So much fun in math! 

Writing has taken off! We are getting ready to choose our SEED idea to grow and publish. Students will simply choose an idea or a story from their Writer's Notebook and we will spend the next few weeks "fancying" up our writing as we learn new strategies. 

Our little social scientists have begun to think about Ellington! We have generated some questions using the QFT (Question Formulation Technique) as we studied the Town Seal. So interesting! Do you know what town seal looks like? We are very excited to learn more about Ellington. 

Have a HAPPY long weekend!

Just a reminder that tomorrow is Picture Day at CLS! We also have P.E. in the morning. Students are welcome to change and freshen up before pictures are taken! SMILE!