Week of October 15th, 2017 -18

Reminders for the Week

This Week Is Global Math Week

CAC elementary school is celebrating Global Math Week, the world’s biggest community mathematics event. The aim of the event is to unite one million students around the globe in a shared experience of joyful uplifting mathematics. During this week at CAC there will be a number of different mathematical activities going on for students and families to enjoy. These include:

• During their math class that week, students will participate in the Global Math Week focus activity - Exploding Dots!
• A Math Trail will be set up around the elementary school grounds. Students and families can complete the tasks during recess or after school and submit their responses each day. At the end of the week a display will showcase the most creative solutions.
• A Problem of the Day will be posed to challenge our most dedicated mathematicians. Parents are allowed (and encouraged) to help!
• A Parent Workshop will provide an opportunity for parents to share in the joy and fun of Exploding Dots alongside their children, and will share some tips for keeping the math fun going at home.

The ultimate goal of Global Math Week is to change the way the world sees math. We want to help our students appreciate math as joyful, relevant, meaningful and creative. Join us in celebrating the wonder of math!

Global Math Week Parent Workshop

Tuesday 17th October, 8:30 - 9:30am

READING

This week, our third grade mystery readers will learn a few more reading skills that help to deepen reading understanding within the genre. Readers will have the opportunity to practice inference, monitoring for sense, synthesizing and making predictions as they read. They will step into the shoes of the characters and question not only who might have committed the crime, but also their motives. They will ask: 'Why would this suspect want to do this?', 'What does he or she have to gain?’ and will consider clues along the way. At the same time, like good detectives, they will go back and retrace their steps by rereading when necessary and making sure the clues and the evidence make sense and are fitting together in the mystery puzzle. Ultimately, as they read deeper into their books, they will consider old clues in the light of new information. They will synthesize by asking ‘How does what I’m reading now fit with what came before?’ and will revise their predictions because the story shows them a new angle or clue that they didn’t know previously.

WRITING

This week our third grade poets will learn a few strategies writers use to create poems. They will learn that poets use “line breaks” as a way to create rhythm or sound, to signal meaning, and sometimes to give poems a particular appearance. They will also learn that poets do not wait to revise their pieces. They re-work each piece looking for ways to add details or choose words that evoke emotion or create imagery.

As part of our Poetry Unit, each child will share their parent’s favorite poem, as well as presenting their own favorite poem in a routine called “Poem of the Day”. This week, 3rd graders will bring home information as to when their sharing day will be and what to reflect on in preparation. Poems are available in the classroom libraries, at the ES library and even online.

MATH

This week our mathematicians will continue to gain practice and build their fluency in rounding two-, three-, and four-digit numbers to the nearest ten and nearest hundred. Students will also learn to use the standard algorithm when regrouping numbers in addition problems involving measurements. These problems will require students to rename ones as tens and tens as hundreds as necessary, and, to understand conceptually what this means. 

Throughout each lesson, there will be a number of word problems that go along with the concepts learned. We are proud of each and every student as they continue to improve their understanding of these real world problems using the Read, Draw and Write method. 

You can help your child by encouraging them to read (and re-read) word problems carefully to identify a) what info is known and b) what is unknown (what is the question asking us to solve). Highlighting or underlining the necessary information--stripping away the language to get at the root of the problem--can be really helpful for learners. This takes lots of practice and the more attempts they have, the better they will get at solving word problems!

SOCIAL STUDIES AND SCIENCE

This week in Social Studies we continue our “One World- Our Community” unit,  to explore maps. We are discovering what it is like to live in other countries around the world. Students will use what they have learned about map keys to look at maps that show elevation, precipitation, temperature and population to think about how that will effect the food, clothing and shelter of the people living in that area. We will once again look at the photos of Families Around the World and examine corresponding maps to see if what we see in the photo relates to what information we can find out in our maps. 

Students will also continue to monitor their soil pots from the Science unit, recording their data onto their documents.