Friday, Sept. 23

Happy Homecoming 3C and Families!
We have had a very busy first few weeks of school.  We are all working hard to establish daily routines and and the students are learning them quickly as we move onto assessments and curriculum.

In reading, we have built our Read to Self stamina up to 20 minutes.  This is one job we will do everyday at school and hopefully each night at home.  We also started Read to Someone.  With this, students read the same book, side by side.  One student reads one page and the other student shares a "Check for Understanding", then they trade jobs on the next page.  A "Check for Understanding" is a great reading strategy where students say one sentence of "who is on the page and what happened to them?"

In writing, we have built our stamina to 19 minutes of uninterrupted writing.  Our young authors are eager to share and their great thoughts.

I am very excited for our spelling this year.  We have divided the students into groups and they travel to a third grade classroom, possibly our own, and we assess on Fridays and receive next week's list.  I enjoy meeting different third graders and the students enjoy working with different teachers, students and in a different classroom.

In math, we are also setting up routines and daily jobs.  We have started ST Math again and we have a new app that focuses on basic addition and subtraction facts.  We have also learned games to play with a friend that practice our new skills.

In science, we have lots of critters in our classroom.  We are working on our Plants and Animals Populations unit.  We are observing an ant farm, fruit fly populations, aphids, and daphnia.  Next week we will have a couple more!

Thanks for all you are doing to have a successful start to third grade.  Just a couple reminders, Reading Logs are due each Monday morning, math packets are due back each Friday, and spelling tests are on Fridays.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Mrs. Midthus