Harvest Festival was today.  Sorry that they all came home pretty wound up.  We are working really hard on our non-fiction and subtraction skills.  We have finished our Rocks and Minerals Science Kit.  We will be focusing more on social studies and health over the next couple of weeks.  We are also working on writing personal narratives. 

    Today we continued working on finding the main idea of non-fiction texts.  We read about Thomas Jefferson.  Tomorrow we will be taking a test on finding the main idea of an article. 
    I have noticed that subtraction with regrouping is a lot more difficult for this group of kids in general.  We will continue to practice this skill for a while.
    We had our last rocks and minerals lesson today.  Tomorrow we will have a little rocks and minerals celebration at the end of the day.

    It is so wonderful to be back with your kids today!  I heard wonderful things from the guest teacher, and I promised them a treat when I got back if they were respectful and responsible for her...so, it is true....I gave them doughnuts.  I promise not to do it all the time :).  A couple of students even earned prizes from my prize box. 
    In reading we are working really hard on identifying the main idea of a non-fiction text.  Finding the main idea of a text is tricky for third graders, and it is something that will require a lot of practice. 
    In math we are working on subtraction with regrouping.

    Just a reminder that I am in a training this week.  I will be in each evening to check my phone messages and email.

    Today we worked in our science kits identifying minerals.  Tomorrow we will be taking two tests!  We will be taking a test on Maintaining Meaning in non-fiction, as well as a test on addition with regrouping in math.

    Tonight is Parent Math Night with Ms. Debbie Lane!  Please come and join us.  We will be learning a fun game that we like to play here at school.  The game is fun for kiddos who struggle with math, as well as those who are very skilled mathematicians.  Many of you have noticed that Math in Focus is quite different from the way that we learned math, but it is truly an amazing program.  If you come you will learn new ways to support what your kids are doing in math here at school. 
    Today we talked a bit about the fact that I am going to be gone next week from Monday October 22nd- Thursday October 25th.  I let the class know that I used to be a substitute teacher, and I know that it is a very difficult job.  I expect them on their very best behavior and make the guest's job easier rather than more difficult.  I will be back on Friday to reward all respectful, responsible, kind behavior over the week.  I will be at trainings during the week next week, so I will be around.  I plan to come in to check voicemail and email each day next week.  Please feel free to email or call.  It may take me a day to get back to you, but I will do it a.s.a.p. 

    We had our first art lesson with Mrs. Ryan today.  We had a lot of fun imagining places where Leaf Man could go and Thinking of interesting figures that we can make with leaves.  Thank you for the wonderful project Mrs. Ryan!
    Progress Reports came home today.  I am very proud of every one's hard work.

    More minerals today.  We started a contest to identify the minerals in our mineral kit.  We talked a little bit about science safety, and how we need to wear gloves because some minerals can be harmful to us if we get them all over our skin.  Please rest at ease that all of our minerals are safe for students to work with.  We just like to form good science habits.  Today we learned some of the properties of Feldspar, Sulfur, Hematite, and Graphite, and we ran tests on them to try and discover which minerals from our kit match the properties.
   Progress Reports will be coming home tomorrow. 

    I apologize that I haven't been very communicative this week.
    Yesterday we talked about the steps we take when we add three and four digit numbers.  We made sure to talk about the reasons why we start at the one's place and move up to the thousand's place.  Today we worked on actually regrouping numbers, and we took some time to talk about what regrouping means and why we need to do it.  I do my best to use our vocabulary word "sum" often enough that they remember it, but the more you can enforce that vocabulary at home, the better it will stick with them.
    Today in non-fiction we took our first test.  The students were asked to identify three different functional documents, their text features, and their purposes, as well as make a prediction about an article based on text features, and confirm or revise that prediction. 
    We also worked on science a little bit.  Learned and wrote about the different properties we use to classify minerals, and the tests that we run on them to learn learn about their properties.  Next week we will be going back to our own rocks and minerals kit, running tests, and competing to see who can properly identify the most minerals.  I will be giving them the uses and properties of each mineral, and they will be running tests to identify them. 
    I will also be putting the book order in next week, so if you would like to order books then please make sure to send your check made out to Scholastic Inc., and your order form in by Wednesday. 
    Thank you for your continued support.  I really appreciate everything you do to help us here at school.

    We started our chapter on addition today in math.  Everyone was so excited to be back in familiar waters!  Tomorrow we are going to be working on four digit addition without regrouping.  I don't want us to leave behind the difficult material we have been working on though so I will be continuing to push students to think flexibly about place value, round numbers, estimate, and do math mentally using efficient strategies. 
    We finished our first read aloud book There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom by Louis Sachar.  Everyone seemed to enjoy the book immensely.  Our next read aloud will go along with our social studies unit on Elections.  It is called How Not to Run for President.
    In non-fiction work we read an article today about Olympic Athletes.  We practiced making predictions, and asking questions before we read a text.  Tomorrow we will be looking at functional documents like calendars, schedules, the food pyramid, brochures, flyers, and lunch menus. 
    The PTA's fall fundraiser has started.  The coupon book that came home today is for sale for $30.  If you have any questions please let me know.  If you do not plan to allow your child to sell coupon books, that is understandable.  Please make sure that they bring the book back to school and we will make sure it gets returned. 

    Today we checked out books using our new classroom library system.  The wonderful thing about the new system is that it will prompt students to write a review each time they return a book to the book library.  This will increase my ability to monitor students progress and help them find interesting books that are at their level.
    We are continuing our work in non-fiction texts for a couple of weeks to come.  We have been talking about how to find the right non-fiction text, and how we can use text features when we are pre-reading non-fiction.
    Tomorrow is our test on Mental Math and Estimation.  Those rounding skills are going to be important.  We have been talking about how to use rounding to help us check our work to see if our answer is reasonable.  It is also important that students understand that 68 tens is equal to 680.  Next week we are going to start our chapter on addition with regrouping.  We play a game in this chapter called "Go for the Smallest".  If you would like to stop by and learn the game just send me an email.  This is a game that is fun even for me and would be easy to learn and play at home!  Mrs. Lane, our excellent Math Coach is going to host another parent math night this month.  It will be on October 17 from 6:00-7:00.  That would be an excellent night if you and interested in learning about how we teach addition with regrouping.

    Today is the first day of Drama Club!  I hope to continue to blog about our room every day, but please forgive me if I tend to miss on Wednesdays as I will be doing Drama right after school. 
    Today in reading we really started to dig into non-fiction texts!  We broke up into small groups and talked about text features and how we can use the text features in our non-fiction books to help us understand what we are reading.

    Today we practiced our descriptive writing skills.  We had a lot of fun doing it.  I gave each table group a picture of something and the group needed to write a few sentences describing what was in the picture without using it's name.  I then switched descriptions and had a different group draw what was being described.  Two of my favorites were the iceberg that was drawn as a whale, and the lemur that was drawn as a polar bear.

    We worked really hard in math today.  We learned about how the English language began years and years ago.  We learned about how King Alfred had to turn English into a written language, and it was hard for him because he had to make 18 different vowel sounds with only 5 different vowel letters.  We learned how he gave each vowel letter a short sound and a long sound, then started teaming vowels up, and even used the consonants r, w, and y to work with vowels to make new vowel sounds. 
    We have been using the mental math strategies we've practiced to solve for mystery numbers.
    We also got new desk spots today!