Classroom News!

In our third week of school, the third graders now have a pretty good grasp of the daily routines and procedures, and are taking ownership and responsibility for their learning environment. 

In Mathematics, we’ve been learning about how to display and communicate data using a variety of methods – including Venn Diagrams, bar graphs, pictographs, and dot plots.  We’ve been surveying each other about favorite ice cream flavors, book genres, people living in your house, pets, and more – graphing it all and having great discussions.  We’ve also been working on beginning-of-year baseline assessments.

In writing this week, we explored two strategies to generate personal narratives: thinking of a person or a place important to you, and then writing about clear, small moments you have had with that person or special place. Students brainstormed where and how writers get their ideas, and many of them began drafting personal stories. I emphasized, and will continue to teach - that good writers put on “binoculars” to “zoom in” on particular moments. We should consider our readers - will they be captivated by a laundry-list dawn-to-dusk summary of your trip to the beach? Or will they be more intrigued by a juicy, detailed description of the small, wondrous universe you discovered in the 10 minutes you spent gazing into a tidepool?

If there's one thing about writing I can't emphasize enough with you and your child it is this: writing happens everywhere!! It is not something to be practiced solely within the walls of a room or chained to a desk. Now that our classroom routines are established, I hope to get them outside more often with a pencil and writer's notebook in hand, especially on nicer days. Here they are better able to observe and record life with their words and sketches. People, animals, daydreams and places they see can all become characters or settings in their writing. Of course they will continue to work on spelling and word skills this year. They will learn revising and editing skills, and they will write informational articles. In the process, I also want them to continue to love to write, to see themselves as writers and encourage them to observe life through their authors lens.

The first weeks of Reading Workshop are spent listening to reading, setting up our classroom library, getting to know our books, learning about the various genres we have in our classroom library, and assessment. Some mini-lessons this week included getting in the practice of honest self-monitoring (“is this a just-right book for me?”), recording in-the-moment thinking using sticky notes while reading, and discussing when it is or is not appropriate to just abandon a book.  We also talked about how good readers make predictions, find connections, and ask questions while they are reading.


I am in the process of meeting with each student in order to get to know them better as readers. These crucial first meetings will help me set initial goals with them and help get the right books into their hands. You can support this process by giving them a time and place to settle into a book, to read alone, read aloud to you, read to a sibling, neighbor, pet or friend. In addition, a routine of sitting together with an adult or as a family to listen to a great book can be a wonderful way to bond together as well as strengthen those fluency skills and their love of reading. Your local librarian is a great resource for finding fantastic read-alouds you can share together – or feel free to ask me for a recommendation!

Finally, we began our first chapter book read-aloud, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, and practiced the homework journal format we will use in 3rd grade. We may do a few more days of guided practice with the latter next week before the kids fly solo with it - I really want them to enjoy and succeed with it!


Some questions to ask your third grader:

• Which do you think is a better way to display data: a bar graph, a dot plot, a pictograph, or just numbers in a data table?  Why?

• What are some reasons readers abandon books?  When is a good idea to abandon a book?  On the other hand, why might it be a problem to constantly abandon books one after another?

• Tell me about what is happening right now in The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.  Why did Pellegrina tell Edward the story of the princess?  What do you think kept Edward going when he was buried under all that garbage at the dump? How would you feel?

• How has your class been using iPads during read-aloud?   During Math?

• What does it mean to "put on your binoculars" as a writer?  How are you doing that with the writing you are working on?

That’s the third grade news for now…  next week, we’re off on our first field study hiking the Oak Island Loop! 

 Have a great weekend!

~ Asa