Week of February 11th, 2017 -18

Reminders for the Week


READING

This week, readers in the third grade will use their analytic skills to think about how all the parts of a story fit together, especially when we come to the end of a book. They will reflect on the choices the author makes to give roundness and complete meaning to his/her story. We will begin a new read aloud, “Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel” and we will work on identifying similarities and differences with our previous read aloud, “Because of Winn-Dixie”. This will give students the opportunity to make connections and compare and contrast characters from different stories. In their independent reading, students will analyze wants and needs characters from different stories might have in common and will also work on identifying differences. At the same time, readers will compare and contrast characters’ ways to tackle trouble and find solutions to similar problems.

WRITING

Students will start the week by revising and editing their second Fairy Tale piece. Later in the week, students will create and write their own original fairy tale. They will start by generating a few story ideas that include a character with wants, who encounters trouble, and in the end, ta-da, there’s a resolution. Once they have narrowed their ideas to one, students will proceed through the writing process to develop their fairy tale. Their fairy tale will be completed after Spring Break. This part of the unit focuses on learning different ways to revise. 

MATH

Moving into the second week of our unit on fractions, third grade mathematicians will start the week creating non-unit fractions less than one whole by making copies of unit fractions. For example, students will take a whole partitioned into equal parts, shade one part (a unit fraction), and then shade other parts to make copies of the shaded part (see diagram).

Building off of this foundation, learners will identify shaded and unshaded parts of a whole as fractions and represent parts of one whole as fractions using number bonds.

They will finish the week building fractions that are greater than one whole, through pictorial representations and number bonds, and begin comparing the size of unit fractions using fraction strips.

Key vocabulary includes:

-non-unit fraction - a fraction with a numerator other than 1

-unit form - 1 third, 2 fourths

-numerical form - 1/3, 2/4

-copy

-parts of a whole

SOCIAL STUDIES

This week each class will work together to research a country looking at each area of culture outlined last week. We will be modeling finding, recording and citing information relating to the country and the questions each class created last week. We will look at the different resources including the visual tab on the Elementary library page. We will be working through the 'Big 6' research and recording our findings in our research booklet.