It was so wonderful to meet with all of you last week! I really enjoyed discussing your child and all of the progress they have made this year. This week in a nutshell: Technology- Seesaw- Seesaw is an interactive journal for your child. It was introduced this week to our class. Your child can use this portfolio to display what they know. For example, today, I shared a winter scene with the class. Their task was to add winter emojis, such as deer, trees, people, etc. To review adjective/noun pairs, the students labeled each emoji with an adjective/noun pair. As we get more proficient with using this tool, it is my hope to share their online portfolios with you so you can see more of what we are doing during the day. I know with worksheets being limited, the Friday folders are mainly full of homework and tests. We do SO much more than that in room 9 and this is an awesome way to display it. Readworks- Third grade really shifts from learning to read to reading to learn. Readworks.org is one way to use grade level text to respond to literature. There are short articles at your child's reading level, followed by multiple choice questions, as well as a few open response. A huge thing we are currently working on in reading is RACE. Writing- Your child began his or her Expert writing. Each child chose a topic they are an "expert" on to write an informational essay. Topics ranged from Mexico, Greece, Soccer, Fortnite, Wade Boggs, ect. The kids love that they were able to choose a topic they wanted to write about! We organized all of our knowledge into 3 subtopics and have began our essays with a lead (a question, fact or description) and a topic sentence (Beyond their previous "Let me tell you about..." leads in the past. They are coming out awesome! Reader's Workshop- This week, we began text structure. Close reading of informational text is really making me work for my paycheck! Text structures were introduced Monday. It is the goal that students notice that nonfiction is structured in a way that makes sense for comprehension of the piece. Sequence was the first text structure we visited. Though the students were able to sequence a text with clue words, such as "first, next, then and last" they were really challenged with other types, such as biographies, "how its made" types of text, etc without the guide words. We really focused on slowing down and thinking, what is this paragraph about? What did I learn from it? and record it in order. Math- We are finishing up Chapter 6, multiplication and division strategies. So far, we have learned 7 specific strategies to attack multiplication or division problems. We have practiced with the 2's, 3's, 5's and 10's tables. So many students are completing Dance mat Typing with over 80% accuracy. We have started timed typing fluency probes on Tuesdays. During this time, the students are given a story starter, a timer is set for 3 minutes and the goal is to increase the amount of words typed in three minutes each week. We track our progress by completing each week under the last in the same document in Google Docs. Students learned how to select the words they wrote and used "tools" to find word count. Our current typing whiz, Ella Kozlik, is typing 53 words in 3 minutes!
As students "graduate" from Dance mat, the role of "blogger" is available. See the top two blog posts to see our November and December blog from the students! Have a great weekend! Mrs. Ferreira
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Mrs. FerreiraTeacher, Foodie, Mother, Wife. Archives
April 2019
Categories |