I hope that
everyone had a wonderful Winter Break and good start to the New Year. From the stories your children have shared,
it sounds like your breaks were busy, full of family, and enjoyable. As a community we have enjoyed listening to
things classmates smelled, tasted, felt, saw, heard and learned over break.
Students were very excited to start theater. We will have theater with Ms. Opsal once a week in half groups for the rest of the year.
The
beginning of a new year has been a good opportunity to remind everyone of
classroom routines. We are practicing
walking respectfully and quietly in the hallway and being productive during the
day. We have also practiced treating
classmates with respect and kindness. I continue to be impressed by this wonderful group of students! It is a pleasure to spend the day with them.
We
recently completed a unit on division. During this unit, third graders
developed an understanding of the concept of division as well as a number of
strategies for dividing larger numbers.
We frequently made the connection between multiplication and
division. We introduced the long
division algorithm through the use of place value blocks. Students used manipulatives and then drew
pictures before recording their thinking using partial quotients. We are
continuing to develop increasingly efficient strategies. The work and final assessment for the unit will come home soon.
Our
current unit is on using bar models to solve multiplication and division
problems. It is amazing the complexity
of the word problems third graders can solve when they use bar modeling to
represent each part of the problem. In
order to solve multi-digit multiplication and division problems efficiently and
accurately, third graders should be able to answer single-digit multiplication
facts in 3 seconds or less. Please
assist your child in reaching this goal by continuing to practice at home.
We have been busy working in the E+P Lab on our animals. Third graders created an animal that could only survive in the Biome they researched. They are now working to program the animal to find food and protect itself. Ask your child how their animal gets food. It is fun to hear about the creative ways they come up with for an animal to survive in a particular Biome. It is exciting to see them synthesize their Biome research as they create these wonderful animals.
