Third Grade Week 5

Another exciting week as third grade teacher.  I am finally feeling comfortable with how Highland Primary works and am working on understanding the third grade mind, if that is possible.  I have seen some pretty funny and bizarre things as well as some very awesome behaviors.  One of the awesome facts that I have seen from my students is that at this age they care about each other.  I have seen kids reach out and help each other.  This week was our first AR party.  There were some students who didn't reach their goal.  I was desperate to have every student attend without just giving them the opportunity.  I wanted them to attend so that they can see how fun the party was, thereby having a desire to read so that they too could accomplish their goals.  That morning I came up with the idea that kids could use tokens to buy their way to the party, one time deal of course.  Four of the students didn't have the tokens to give, but without any hesitation students pitched in together to use their own good behavior tokens on the behalf of others.  I thought that was pretty cool.  It makes me wonder at what age students start to care less about each other, because at the high school and Jr. High level, this might of happened, but not with that many students.  Good for my kids.  I am proud of their behavior.

I had a student's parent give me this as my daily reading bookmark.  The likeness of this bookmark and my teenage pictures is uncanny.

Here is a picture of a petrified piece of wood that was brought in.  I think this is an awesome decoration.

This Friday was the Remembering 9-11 Patriotic Dress up Day.  Most of my students participated.   Some of the dress ups were fantastic.

Spelling list 5 is up and ready to be studied.  Remember I have linked the lists to Spelling City, so if your students are having trouble spelling words I encourage you to give them some time to play the Spelling city games found at the links in this paragraph.  Spelling list 4 test has been graded, so you can used Family Link to see what their score was.  This week we are concentrating on the silent "e".

Most of the students brought their homework, but some did not, so this is a reminder that if they haven't brought in their homework folder and turned in their homework, reading log and math, they will be given study hall time on Tuesday.  I hate doing that, but the math practice and the reading is important.

Last week we discussed figurative language using metaphors, similes, personification, onomatopoeias, and idioms.  If parents know what those are, I encourage pointing them out to your children as you come across them in their reading or just in everyday life.

Mr. Owen's found a salamander this week and being the awesome administrator that he is, he brought him in to all the classes.  It was really cool.  Now that is learning on the fly.  (See what I did there?  I used an idiom.)

We are still working on multiplication and division.  We aren't quite memorizing them as facts yet, but teaching them how to go about finding solutions if they don't have their math facts memorized.  Hopefully we will get those facts down.

Coming up this week, we will continue working with Multiplication and Division and something called fact families which is the relationship between multiplication and division.

In reading we will be concentrating on Non-Fiction texts, especially articles from magazine and the internet.

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions.  Thanks for raising good and honest kids.  Keep up the good work.