Mrs. Kocourek's Third Grade: Week of February 19

Hi Families,

Wow! I was showered with chocolates, candies, gifts, and thoughtful letters on Valentine's Day! Thank you all so much. I am lucky to be surrounded by such a great group of kids and families!

100th Day of School -- Dressing as 100 Year Old's!

When I asked, "What do 100 year olds do?" students replied with, "They read the newspaper!!"

Pictures from our Valentine's Celebration with our First Grade Buddies

Reminders/Updates

The Six Flags Read to Succeed Forms are due on Wednesday, February 21.
Our February Family Night is coming up soon!! Are you interested in donating cookies or serving cookies at our next Family Night? It will be February 27th!

Click here to sign up to serve cookies at the Family Night
Click here to sign up to donate cookies

Upcoming Events

February 22: NO SCHOOL
February 22: NDLC Night at Funset
February 23: NO SCHOOL
February 27: Family Night: Music and Munchies
March 2: Dress Like Your Favorite Book Character
March 5: Culver's Night 5:00-8:00 (Ms. Feldkamp will be serving from 7-8!)
March 6: PAC Artistic Adventures field trip in the afternoon
March 8: Author's Breakfast
March 9: Early Dismissal

Curriculum Update

Math: This week we worked on telling time to the minute! We also studied elapsed time. This is a fun skill for students to practice at home, as this is used every day in our lives! You could ask your child to keep track of the time they start reading at night, and what time they should stop if they are going to read for 20 minutes. Or, if a TV show starts at 7:00, how much time until it will start? Getting students to see that they use this stuff all the time will help them be motivated to be able to do this! Next week, we'll solve word problems involving time and also read and create bar graphs and pictographs.

Writing: Students were able which type of writing they want to work on--narrative, opinion, or information! So far there are some captivating mysteries, some knowledgeable all about books, some mystical fairytales, and some convincing letters! We also set deadlines for ourselves and planned out what we are going to do in our writing each day until the end of the unit. This was very powerful for students to see! Some have been bringing home their writing if they didn't meet their deadline or if they just want to. :) Next week, we'll work to add simple and compound sentences to our writing. I noticed that students are not always writing in complete sentences, so focusing on sentence structure should help to correct this.

Word Study: We have been studying words with open syllables. We'll continue in Unit 7 next week by practicing with words that have more than one syllable type (open, closed, and vowel-consonant-silent e). The trick words for this week will be city, every, and family. Continue to do a little of the Unit 7 Word Study packet each day!

Reading: This past week we began analyzing poetry. Each student has a poetry packet with a variety of poems. Some short, long, more difficult, some rhyme, etc. Each day students are rereading their poems and analyzing them in a new lens! For example, we read to find the deeper meaning, rhymes, alliteration, etc. Students should be bringing home fiction to read each night! :) This coming week we are going to figure out the true meaning of the poems we read. We will also start paying attention to the words that help paint an image in our minds as we read. These images will help us understand the poems even better!

Content: This week we worked on our final design challenge: creating a vehicle based upon certain requirements! We tested out our vehicles to check if they met all the necessary requirements. As we are coming to an end of this unit, next week we'll play a game to review and then take the test to assess all we learned in our Motion and Design unit.

Check out the pictures below of students designing their vehicles! Pictures of the final product will be on Seesaw!