Weekly Update- 12/9

The students are doing a great job with their multiplication facts!  Thanks for all of the practice you are doing at home.  Now that we have made all of our flashcards, the students can keep them at home.  However, keep practicing those facts; we will be moving onto division soon!  Today, the students learned how to multiply in order to find the number of combinations of objects.  We will be reviewing a little bit differently for the topic test.  On Monday, the practice test will be going home for the students to complete at home for homework.  It needs to come back to school on Tuesday so that we can review the concepts in class. The Topic 6 test is on Wednesday.

In reading, we used the book, George Washington Carver: Peanut Wizard to learn about the skill of using background knowledge when reading.  We then continued to read, Ramona Quimby: Age 8 to practice these skills.  The students are continuing to read independently and documenting the strategy that they are using.  In guided reading we worked on using text features to help understand a nonfiction text. 

In writing, the students learned how to write a book blurb.  They looked at many examples of  blurbs found on popular third grade books.  They then wrote their own for the folk tale, The Lucky Charm which we read as a class. We also practiced writing a basic paragraph and using 5 strong sentences.

We are continuing with our weather unit in science.  This week, we learned about different types of clouds. The students created a cloud mobile and sketched the 3 main types of clouds (stratus, cirrus, cumulus) into their science notebooks.  We have also started learning about different types of storms.  So far, we have talked about thunderstorms and hurricanes.  We are tracking our very own Hurricane Sulli as  it makes its way through the Atlantic.  The students are documenting its coordinates, wind speed, and status (tropical depression, tropical storm, category of hurricane) and then using latitude and longitude to plot the hurricane's path on a tracking chart.

We have just completed our unit on schwa sounds in Fundations.  In Spanish, we have started to learn the names for the different colors.  In grammar, we discussed imperative and exclamatory sentences.  Starting next week, the students will begin updating the blog!  Have a great weekend!