November 3 - 7

WRITING

We are well into our unit on Expository/Informational writing and will be continuing with it this week. We have gathered facts and organized them into subtopics, planned with a graphic organizer, created strong leads, and written structured paragraphs. This week, we will focus on adding a conclusion paragraph, creating a creative title, and writing informative captions. 

READING

This week, we will continue learning more about nonfiction texts. For this week's focus, we will discuss how main idea is built around a central topic, supported by details, and covered by a main idea sentence. Students will be assessed on their understanding of main idea at the end of the week.

The story for this week is The Albertosaurus Mystery.  As we did last week, students will be assigned an additional comprehension activity that needs to be completed at home and will be due on Thursday. This week’s questions will be sent home, as they are not in the weekly yellow comprehension packet. Students are expected to read the story at home. In addition to answering each question, students are expected to find the page number in which the answer can be found in the text.

MATH 

We will complete our money unit on Tuesday or Wednesday. After that, we will shift our focus to multiplication strategies for facts of 2, 4, and 8. Students will not only need to know their math facts, but they will need to understand the strategies behind how the answers are produced. We look at 2s facts as "doubles", 4s facts as "double doubles", and 8s facts as "double double doubles." For example, when we see 3x8, we know that 8s are "double double doubles", so we double the 3 to get 6. . . double the 6 to get 12 . . . and double the 12 to get 24. Please keep in mind that each child in 3^rd grade is expected to know their multiplication facts through 10, as well as their inverse division facts with atomicity by the end of the school year. If you are not working with your child on some type of math nightly, please take the time to practice multiplication facts with your child. Thank you!

SCIENCE

We will be using several hands-on activities to guide our learning this week as we explore mixtures in the classroom. Your child should be able to identify the difference between a mixture and a solution by the end of this learning unit.