Week of December 18-22

Hello Families,

I can tell students are getting ready for the holidays and winter break...especially with our first substantial snow fall! We also have had Jingle Bell Rock on repeat to help us with our song that we'll sing on Thursday for our school sing off. If you'd like to practice with your child at home, feel free! I have our lyrics below :)


Tune of Jingle Bell Rock
NDLC, NDLC
NDLC rocks!
We like to read
and we like to write.
Solving and marking
up math papers of fun
Now the real fun
has begun

NDLC, NDLC
NDLC rocks
We like to play
and we like to learn.
Walking in silence
in NDLC halls
Where we go on our way

What a fun time
in our school day
to learn all day long.
NDLC time
is a swell time
to go learning
in all sorts of cool ways!

Bring your books and dive in your
stories galore.

Reminders/Updates

• Monday will be Day 2.
• To go along with our Pajama Day on Thursday, we will be watching a movie with all of NDLC third grade. We will be watching Finding Dory, which is rated PG. Please let me know if you have any concerns about the movie's rating and we will make arrangements. 

Upcoming Events

December 21: Pajama Day
December 22-January 1: NO SCHOOL Winter Break! :)

Curriculum Update

Math: We started Unit 3! Students seem to be more comfortable in this unit so far since it is not such a new concept as multiplication and division were. So far we have looked at place value drawings for numbers and writing numbers in expanded form. For example, 328 can be written in expanded form as 300+20+8 or 3 hundreds + 2 tens + 8 ones. This helps students to see what each digit in a number actually represents. Next week, we will put our story problem skills to work with place value word problems. We will also discuss rounding to the nearest hundred and ten, which can be a challenging concept for students. However, this is such a useful skill for students to have to estimate and decide on reasonableness of an answer. 
*If your student (or you!) are still struggling with the concept of division, please feel free to check out my post "What Does Division Mean?" 

Writing: Students have been working to sound like the expert that they are in their information writing by including vocabulary, definitions, and text boxes. We also added in interesting introductions and conclusions to hook our readers. As we are getting closer to the end of this information unit, we will be editing our writing as well as looking at checklists to decide what we need to do to make our writing EVEN better! After all, our class motto is, "I can make this better, but how?" Our third and fourth grade writing checklists will help us to answer that question of "how?"

Word Study: This week we practiced writing words with suffixes...and even challenged one another to see just how many words we could make with suffixes! We finished up this unit by taking the test; look for the tests to come home early next week. 

Reading: This past week we thought a lot about author's perspective in nonfiction texts. We learned that we can look for the punctuation, pictures, and word choice the author uses to help us think of what the author truly thinks about the topic. This coming we will wrap up our nonfiction unit! We will be looking at a different type of nonfiction, narrative nonfiction. This is when a nonfiction book is written as a story. Often times biographies are good examples of this type of genre. Friday we will have our celebration and discuss everything we have learned and write goals for what we would like to accomplish when we come back to nonfiction later in the year! :)

*Scholastic book orders were submitted this past Wednesday. I am hoping they will be in by Thursday! Please let me know if you would like this to be a surprise for your child (if you haven't already).

Content: Students have been growing their knowledge of the world through closely examining maps, statistics, video, images, models, and articles. We will continue with our centers next week so each group has a chance to learn through reading, watching a video, comparing a map to a globe, and more. I have been posting pictures of groups as they complete their model of the world on Seesaw!



Know that you can always contact me with any questions or concerns. Have a wonderful weekend!

Best,
Jenny