Week of January 14th, 2017 -18

Reminders for the Week

House Event on Tuesday - please wear your House t-shirt. 



READING

Welcome to a new year of reading! This week, students in the third grade will begin a new reading unit focusing on character development. “Character Studies” will give readers the opportunity to draw upon skills and strategies they have learned, and understand the stories they read through the eyes of the characters in these stories. Third grade readers will read realistic fiction and will work on becoming experts about the characters. As they read through, they will move from making simple observations to interpreting what a character’s words and actions reveal about that character. They will use what they learn to identify patterns and later grow theories.

WRITING

This week in writing, our students step into the world of fairy tale. This unit has three distinct parts that allows writers to explore the genre of fairy tale and grow independence. Third Graders will start the unit by exploring fairy tales that are new to them and retelling fairy tales they already know. They will read fairy tales to notice character traits and patterns in stories. Writers will then choose either Little Red Riding Hood or Billy Goats Gruff to adapt. Students will learn that when one element of the story is changed, such as character or setting, it leads to changing other parts of the story. They will learn to write multiple scenes to tell the story and possibly add a narrator to bring the scenes together.

Later in the unit, students will choose another fairy tale that is well known to them to adapt. For the third writing piece of the unit, students will create their own original fair tale. This unit emphasizes rich dialogue and descriptive language. You can help your child develop their writing by listening to their ideas and storytelling.

MATH

Our week in math will begin with a review of module 4 and what third grade mathematicians have learned so far in their investigations of area using the area model.

This week students will shift towards finding the area of rectangles through multiplication of side lengths. With this area knowledge, our mathematicians will find the measurement of an unknown side length using given information of area and one side length measurement. Students will also analyze different rectangles and reason about their area, combining different rectangles together and calculating the new total area.

By the end of the week, students will take the Mid-module assessment to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts taught thus far. As always, please encourage your young mathematician to review their problem sets and homework and to apply the Read, Draw, Write method when problem solving to fully show their thinking.

SCIENCE

This week students will recap what they discovered about sound, before Winter Break. They will discuss how sound is produced and how they can change the pitch when they change length, tension and thickness.

Students will review what happens when light strikes different surfaces. We have discovered that materials absorb, transmit or reflect light, or a combination. Students will then start an new investigation to determine what happens when light strikes a flat mirror and then what happens if the mirror happens to be convex or concave.