Happy Thursday!



I am sooo sorry! I realized I never sent a weekly update last week. I'm sure all of you were on pins and needles waiting to read it! Anyway, my excuse is that both of my boys were home and we had some great family time!



Here's what we've been doing and what we'll be working on:



Reading: We are now in a new unit - "Reading Science Texts". One of the skills in this unit is to get information from more than one source. I decided to have each student choose a book about an animal. After being given an organizer, we've been looking for facts about 1. what the animal looks like, 2. where it lives, habitat, and environment, 3. what the animal eats, predator or prey, and 4. interesting facts. It's amazing the information they've gotten already! Tomorrow we'll be using encyclopedia entries to find even more information. The end product of all of this research will be a report with two or more text features. If you aren't sure what a text feature is - ask your child!!



Math: We're continuing to work on multiplication and division readiness skills. We're also reviewing subtraction from money with zeros. Please work with your child on this! Next week we'll be covering multiplication of two digits by one digit and division of two digits by one digit.



Writing: I have been reading some great stories from our Writer's Workshop. We've been working with word choice and how to make our vocabulary "splendid"!



Cursive: Next week will be C and E. I am making them use cursive more and more. Their word study test tomorrow will be in cursive. We've gone over all of the lower-case letters, so they really need to use them.



Word Study: We'll be working with suffixes next week.



Science: Mystery Chemicals!!!! We have started our new unit "Chemistry Tests". We've already mixed water with a chemical to make "goo". We made observations of properties and then wrote them down. It was fun to watch the properties change when the water was added. We'll be doing this same experiment with five more SAFE chemicals.



Other information:

The students have been doing so well on their "Global Scholar Testing". It is a pilot program our grade is doing for the county. I explained to the kids that it is a "smart" test that will continue to get more difficult as long as they are getting questions correct. When the student reaches their "limit", they are done. We did one last week for Reading. Tomorrow we will do one for math. Since it's a pilot program, there are no scores to share. More information will be coming out in the UES News.



Thanks to everyone - we had 100% participation for our Valentine's Day party. Sorry for the many reminders! Also, thanks to all who have donated, or will donate, to our Silent Auction basket. It looks to be a wonderful one! Thanks so much to Becca Clark and Rose Ann Shapiro for all of their work for both functions.



Have a wonderful weekend! Hope to see many of you at our Valentine's Day Party! If you decide to come, please take time to walk through the library hallway and see all of the cultural projects from third grade!



Faith Humerick