3rd Grade Newsletter
Third Grade Newsletter
Volume 7, Number 9 sadkins@pennoyerschool.org November 7, 2008
Hello Parents! We had a really great week together, and it was full of election coverage. We held a mock vote here on Tuesday afternoon, and Obama won over McCain, 23 to 13. We spent our computer time looking at Barack Obama’s web site and each child learned at least five new facts about our President elect. Ask your child what they learned about! Since we only have three days of school next week (no school Monday and Tuesday due to Veteran’s Day) I will not write a Newsletter next week and we will not have new reading, spelling, or grammar. We had a busy week, so here’s what’s been happening:
Reading ~ Our story for this week is a wonderful preview into our next weather chapter – Planets in our Solar System! Much noise was created over the fact that this story had a lot of student pencil writing in it. I am here to assure you that I told my previous students to put those marks in so that the story will be accurate. This book was published before Pluto was reduced to dwarf planet status, and we now teach the kids that there are only 8 planets in our solar system. This caused great confusion, and I hope I got it sorted out. We will go into more depth on this topic of Pluto when we start our new science unit before Thanksgiving.
Language Arts ~ Our grammar lesson this week was on possessive nouns. The rule for these is in order to make a word possessive, you add ‘s to the end of the word. If the word already ends in an s, you only add an apostrophe to the end, after the s. The kids actually did a great job with this in class. The test shall tell! We spent our writing time working on our rough drafts. Hopefully they all got their rough drafts done by today. The kids have been doing a really great job with their expository writing, and I am excited to see how the final product turns out!
Math ~ We worked on chapter 6 this week which was on graphing and analyzing data. We actually started the week with a Unit 2 test which was multiple choice and covered addition and subtraction. From there we learned about surveys, finding the range, median, mode, and mean of a set of numbers, reading and making line plots, making a table to solve problems, and pictographs and bar graphs. Whew. We will just have one more lesson next week in this chapter on ordered pairs, then we will have a review day and chapter 6 test will be given next Friday. Fortunately there will be no other tests that day due to the short week.
Science ~ We have finished up our chapter on weather and are now starting to review. Yesterday the kids watched a short movie on weather, and we got started on our review homework. The homework is page D52, numbers 1 – 19, all answers to be written in complete sentences. This review is due next Friday, November 14, and the test on weather will be given on Monday, November 17. Please make sure your child is studying for this test a little bit every night.
Social Studies ~ Unfortunately, Mrs. Michaels has been out sick this whole week with pneumonia, and I was unable to get a paragraph from her describing what they did in social studies. I know that they did some reading and some vocabulary definitions, but you will have to ask your child for more specifics on what they did in social studies this week.
Other Areas of Interest:
Szymon’s 9th birthday was this past Tuesday, and we were delighted to celebrate with him on Election Day. Happy birthday Szymon!
Report cards went home today. Please look for these and go over them with your child. I will need the empty envelope back next week with your signature on it, please. I am looking forward to discussing your child’s progress with you coming up on Monday, November 24. The time of you scheduled conference is located at the top right of your child’s report card, and I highlighted it in yellow.
The kids attended a Veteran’s Day assembly this morning. Be sure to ask your child all about it!
As of this week, the kids have officially learned all of their lower case letters in cursive. They are invited to start writing in cursive (anything except spelling words) at home and at school, and I will certainly start writing things in cursive to get the kids used to reading it. Starting in January in the 3rd quarter, all third graders will be expected to write everything (except spelling words) in cursive.
The November Scholastic book order form went home today. If you would like to order books for this month, please return your order form and money to me by Thursday, November 13.
That’s it for now! I couldn’t believe how beautiful the weather turned out on Halloween last week. I can’t remember a better day of trick-or-treating in my life. My own children certainly enjoyed quite a bounty because of it! It is looking like a cold front is coming through town, and we are in for cold weather now for many months. Please remember to dress your child appropriately for the weather. The kids will continue to have recess outside unless the temperature or wind chill reach below zero. I wish you all a wonderful weekend, and remember to keep your child reading!
Mrs. Sarah Adkins
