Mr. Anderson's 3rd Grade Class

"Our Class"

Math: Our math block continues to work with multiplication and division. Each day, we practice our math facts and problem solving skills. We have also learned how to calculate area and our next math unit will review calculating area before we continue learning more about multiplication and division with 6's, 7's and 8's, while incorporating more problem solving strategies too. A good math site to use at home that is great practice for third graders is: www.mathplayground.com. Have your child give it a try if they have some extra time at home.

Reading: The students have been extremely busy! During our Guided Reading time, we have read several stories that continue to build our reading fluency and comprehension. The stories are more challenging due to length and vocabulary than they were at the beginning of the year. Our stories of late have also focused on verbs, homophones, helping verbs, sequencing, predicting outcomes, punctuating dialogue, irregular verbs, pros/cons, prefixes/suffixes and much more. It has been so much fun to see the reading development over the course of the year! We have also read a few chapter books together in class including; Little House in the Big Woods and Pompeii..Buried Alive which have been a lot of fun as well.

Social Studies: Our class read a chapter book titled, Squanto: Friend of the Pilgrims. In this book, we learned a lot about a Native American named Squanto who helped the pilgrims learn how to survive in the new world. From this book, our class learned a lot about the first Thanksgiving and the meaning of Thanksgiving.

Writing: During our Writing/Science blocks, the students have been working on a research project based on the invention each student chose to research. All students are creating a Powerpoint project they will present to the rest of the class on our Smartboard. Along with our inventions, we have also been learning about and building simple machines in class. The kids love building them in class and how they are useful to make work easier. We have also been working hard to learn more cursive writing, utilizing our word wall words and learning some new spelling rules to become more independent spellers. Each student also completed a historical fiction writing project after reading a story about the Titanic. They all did a nice job on their writing and all students have really improved their reading, writing and math skills this year. I am very proud of them!

Science: We have started learning about plants. Why they are important, their functions and identifying their parts. We are currently growing Wisconsin Fastplants where we will monitor growth and change, pollinating the plants and harvesting the seeds. These plants grow extremely fast and we will learn a lot about them. After our plant unit is finished, we will begin learning about our circulatory and respiratory system where we will create a life sized diagram of each student in our class and labels parts of the respiratory and circulatory system.

REMINDERS!!!

Third grade students are responsible to bring his/her own snack for milk break.

Remind your child to continue bringing mittens/gloves, a warm hat and boots to school each day. Without boots, they must stay on the blacktop area of the playground due to the mud and wet areas.

****March 14th - Daylight Savings Time begins

****March 19th - Field Trip to play at Viterbo University. We will be back to school by lunchtime.

****March 23rd & 25th - Parent/Teacher Conferences 3:30 - 6:30 p.m.

****April 2nd - 5th - No School (Spring Break)

****April 22nd - Earth Day

Since we no longer have milk break, we are trying something new for our snack time each day. All students are responsible to bring in their own healthy snack each day. Some great items would be some crackers, veggies in a bag, fruit snacks, etc. Students may also bring in a small juice box to have during snack if they wish as well. This is something we are just trying and if anything changes, a note will come home informing parents about any changes.