I shared some recent pictures of my three silly boys with the students. Here is one of them above. The students always love to hear stories about my boys.
I hope you were able to enjoy the weather today (Sunday), we were able to get outside and play some baseball and shoot some hoops. I am looking forward to our field trip to Kent Park and hoping this great weather continues for us. Reminder: Make sure your child brings a sack lunch!
I also wanted to let you know that I will be teaching 3rd grade again next year! Miss Schuers, Mrs. Dane, and Miss Shapleigh will be the 4th grade teachers for next year.
Reading: We finished out last lesson from our Houghton Mifflin book, in which we read, "Saving Buster". Students read about a character named Donavan that wanted to help raise money to help pay for an operation for Buster, a service dog. We focused on the comprehension skills of drawing conclusions, inferring, and asking questions (before,during, and after) reading.
Spelling: Students took their last spelling test, which focused on words beginning with "a" or "be" such as "below" and "above". I will continue to meet with my Words Their Way group.
Mathematics: Students took their Unit 9 Progress Check on Wednesday. I will return those to students this week. Please sign and return it after you have reviewed it with your child. The rest of week we spent some time playing math games on the Everyday Mathematics website. We have a new lab top cart that allows us to have 30 computers in our classroom at a time, it is great!!!! The next few days, we will be reviewing previous skills/concepts and then we will move onto Unit 10:Measurement and Data.
Science: We have started our new science unit, Lifting Heavy Things. Students have already experienced that there are tools that make our work easier. We have focused on learning about levers; using the vocabulary fulcrum, load, and force. We focused on the importance of safety as we performed three different investigations:
- What happened when you used (your hands, a hammer, a crowbar, scissors, a spoon) to pull a nail out of a piece of wood? Which one was the best tool for the job? Tell why you think so.
- What happened when you used (your hands, a screwdriver, a quarter, a craft stick) to pry off a lid on a empty paint can? Which one was the best tool for the job? Why do you think so?
- What happened when you used (your hands, a meter stick, a board, a hockey stick, a craft stick) to lift the heavy object? Which one was the best tool for the job? Why do you think so?
