Weekly Update

Dear Families,

This week was very busy in our classroom as we started assessing and finishing up projects in many academic areas.
3rd graders started preparing for our place value assessment in math which will be completed before the Thanksgiving break next week. The students are working hard representing digits and numbers in many different ways to show their understanding of addition and subtraction while focusing upon place values. This additive reasoning skill is crucial to have before the students move on to multiplication later on this academic year. After Thanksgiving break, 3rd graders will start working on decimals and geometry. 4th graders follow the same scope and sequence in math and will explore the same topics.
We are finishing up our unit on force and motion. Vocabulary words will continue to come home every Friday (and they are due back the following Friday) but the topic will change after the break as we begin our new physical science study of states of matter and ecology. The students will take home their last list of “Force and Motion” words this week.
The students started a poster project with a partner this week. Together, they will show their understanding of how various forms of force and friction affect motion. When they have completed their poster, they will present it to the class. They will also work in small groups to conduct an experiment while applying scientific concepts, such as observation skills, prediction and collection of data. After the Thanksgiving break, we will start our new unit on ecology. The students will learn about the various habitats and biomes around the world and how a particular region/environment help the animals survive there. We will start the unit with an overview of all of the various regions. After that, we will focus upon a specific area and each 3rd and 4th grade class will study a different region. Our class will study the ocean. While the students are expected to learn identifying features of all regions, they are also expected to learn how animals in the ocean use that particular environment to survive. They will write a report at the end of the unit to show their understanding. I have already linked many interactive sites and games on the wiki for your child to explore at home. Please let me know if you have any problems accessing this information. Please ask your child to tell you what we are doing in school as this unit develops.
In Writer’s Workshop, the students began writing new small moment stories. These stories are about events and episodes from their own lives. They are amazing and we cannot wait to share them with you!

Ask your child about:
• Poetry interpretations using Wordle. (They are linked on our wiki. Please click here to see them.
• Our new letters to our Swedish pen pals focusing on American Thanksgiving
• Class picture from Sweden
• Number Stories
• Our new classroom book “Do you remember when….?” (It will be published soon so please look for it).

Lastly, the students and I discussed sending a holiday package to our Swedish pen pals and since we like our Warm Fuzzies so much, we thought it would be a nice idea to make one for our very own pen pal. If you are interested, and willing, to donate some yarn for this project, we would gladly accept it. Thank you!

Have a great weekend!
Regards,

Maria McCormack