March 23, 2017

One School One Book

Thank you to all families for encouraging family reading time of this year's book In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson! While some of the text may be challenging, this book brings great messages of friendship and diversity and we will discuss these themes in the classroom. I encourage you to also take advantage of the chapter read alouds that are on the Chippewa Portal Page, they can be very helpful. You can find the read alouds by going to the Chippewa Portal Page, clicking on the link at the top titled Media Center and then under the heading Reference K-3 look for the title of the book and click on there for the read alouds as well as a variety of activities that relate to the book. Please remember that chapters are only assigned for reading Monday through Thursday so you have the weekend to "catch up" on any reading you were unable to do during the week. I told the class that any reading they do for One School One Book or listening to the read alouds can count for reading minutes on their reading logs. If there are Math games you also find on the website those can also count for Math minutes. 

ELA

This week we have done some engaging reading skill centers to practice targeted skills. The students complete one activity at each center, when their whole group has completed their center work, as a reward they set a timer and are allowed to use the activity that has been paired with their center for approximately 10 minutes. Some of these activities include learning games, team games and tactile activities. Next week we are going to return to our discussion of comparing and contrasting fictional writing by the same author, the author we are focusing on is Patricia Polacco. I love her books and the lessons or theme that each of them have within them. Following this we are going to do a literature study of the book series Race the Wild and focus on the skill of identifying cause and effect. 

Math

We are currently working on finishing up our chapter about Area and Perimeter, our next chapter will be fractions. My goal is to have the final test for this chapter next Friday, March 31. As we continue this chapter adjustments may need to be made based on students' understanding, I will make sure that students write in their agendas the date of the test if it changes.

Social Studies

This week and next week we will be working on wrapping up our Social Studies unit about Economics. We have previously covered producers/consumers, goods/services, markets, economic benefits/opportunity cost, the next areas we will cover include budgets, positive and negative economic incentives and graphs. Next, we will move to our Science unit about Rocks and Minerals.

Reminders:

March 27th-Board of Education currently scheduled to be at the Board of Education at 7:00 p.m. Please attend to find out updates regarding the levy campaign and things that are going on in the district that may impact you and your family. I encourage you to become involved in some way with the levy campaign, the state continues to make cuts to our district's funding so it is imperative that we pass a levy so that we are able to continue to provide services and programs that make Brecksville Broadview Heights an outstanding school district for all students.

March 28 & March 29th-3rd Grade AIR testing. Please make your best effort to have your child in school those days. Testing will be done during the morning.

April 10-17-Spring Break

March 6, 2017

Parents,

We are coming to the end of the third quarter of the school year. Current events are due this week on March 9th.

Math
In class we are beginning the chapter about perimeter and area. We have used a variety of tools to learn these concepts and we will continue to use hands on techniques to enhance understanding. This week we are learning how to find the measurement of an unknown side in order to find the total perimeter of a shape. By the end of the week we will be moving on to learning how to find the area of a composite shape. 

Science/Social Studies
We completed our science unit about Matter and I am pleased with the outcome of our assessment. We will be moving on to our Social Studies unit about Economics. We have begun learning about goods, services, producers, and consumers. We will begin talking about economic incentives this week. Please don't forget current events are due Thursday, March 9th.

ELA
We have just completed a unit about theme. We used poetry as the genre we were studying and used a variety of different poems to identify theme and metaphors. We previously studied the strategy of compare and contrast using informational text and we are going to go back to the strategy of compare and contrast using the genre of Fairy Tales. We will start using a variety of different fairy tale versions of The Three Little Pigs. The following week we are going to look at a variety of different stories by the same author and compare and contrast those texts. 

Writing
The class has been working on a research project with biographies. Each student chose a biography to read and then used this text to complete a graphic organizer for their notes. These notes were used to complete different sections of a biography lapbook including a timeline, different time periods of each person's life, a question they would ask and information about the researcher. The students then used this information to complete a multi paragraph writing about the person they researched. Next, we will be working on an opinion writing. The rubric that will be used to grade this writing is modeled after the rubric used to grade the writing portion of the AIR test.