Welcome to October in 3rd grade! The students have been busily working to settle into a new year . We will have many exciting new topics to explore this month. Our curricular highlights are as follows:
Religion: This month in religion, we will begin to explore the beginning of the Church and the church year. Our activities include writing “SPIRIT” poems, acting out Scripture stories about the early Church writing and sending a postcard telling the Good News of Jesus, creating a “Good News” chain, role-playing the lives of the early Christians, researching the life of a saint and creating a saint fact poster, and creating a booklet of the Church liturgical year.
Phonics: In Phonics this month, we begin our second unit, a review of long and short vowel rules and sounds. Students will review the rules, complete practice pages identifying vowel sounds in words and pictures, and completing word sorts at centers.
Spelling: Some reminders…
-Beginning this month, students will be tested on a dictation sentences at the end of a spelling test. I will say the sentence and the students must write it down word for word. The sentence will include high frequency words that the students are expected to know how to spell. Students will also be assessed on capitalization and punctuation.
-When practicing the written test with students, please make sure that they are not capitalizing the spelling words. Our spelling words are not proper nouns and should not be capitalized. Beginning this week, points will be deducted if the words are capitalized on Friday’s test.
Our spelling words for the week of 9/29:
open even candle frozen carrots silent
battle lazy lettuce maple fellow fifty
flavor bottle floppy area excitement halfway
heap schedule
Words for weeks of 10/6 & 10/13 (Test will be on Thursday October 16th!)
block brake crazy flash grab plate
blink broad crumble flood grand blind
brisk flame plenty canyons flowed handful
grains peaks
Words for the week of 10/20
spend stream scream spring skate slept
spider strong scrub sprinkle skin sleeve
string screen slice buffalo darkness echoes
ripe shelter
Words week of 10/27:
blankets branches flies mountains states
libraries pairs bunches enemies pockets
jungles daisies inches companies addresses
capture liquid ruin skills struggles
Reading: This month we begin our new theme, “Nature Links”. The stories in this unit will show students how nature can give us new ideas. In our first selection, City Green students will read about a girl who convinces her neighbor that things can be turned around for good by turning a vacant lot into a beautiful community garden. The skills we will learn and apply during this selection include using context clues to determine the meanings of new words, recognizing and inferring cause and effect relationships, locating information in a telephone directory, and drawing conclusions based on 2 or more pieces of information. Our writing activity related to this story will be to plan our own community garden.
In our second selection of the month, The Sun, the Wind, and the Rain, students will read about two mountains, one created by earth, and one created by a girl. As the mountains erode, students will learn the different ways nature can cause change. During our reading, students will compare and contrast things that happen in a story, use context clues to determine the meanings of new words, sequence the events of a story, research mountain facts, use guide words to locate words in a dictionary, and review cause and effect relationships. Our special art activity for this story will be to create a mountain scene using chalk pastels.
In our third selection of the month, Dream Wolf, students will read about two children lost in the hills around their village. A wolf comes to them in their dreams to help them find their way home. The skills students will learn and apply as we read this story include using context clues to determine the meanings of new words, identifying cause and effect relationships, creating a storyboard of the events in Dream Wolf, using an encyclopedia to find information, and comparing and contrasting a characters experience with their own. Our writing activity related to this selection will be to write directions for the 2 lost children back to the camp in the voice of the wolf.
In our final selection of the month, Spiders At work, students will discover how spiders use their unique abilities to survive in the natural world. The skills we will focus on while reading this selection include using context clues to determine the meanings of new words, distinguishing between important and unimportant information, comparing the sizes of spiders in a bar graph, using guide words in a dictionary, and drawing conclusions. Our writing activity related to this selection will be to write an informational spider brochure.
Language: This month we will begin our exploration of nouns. Students will identify common and proper nouns in sentences, complete sentences using common and proper nouns, and form plural nouns.
Rules for students to review:
Noun: a person, place, animal, or thing
-add -s to form the plural of most singular nouns
-add -es to from the plural of singular nouns ending in ch, s,sh, or x (glasses, boxes)
-change y to i and add -es to form the plural of singular nouns ending in a consonant and y (daisy=daisies)
-a common noun names any person, place, or thing
-a proper noun names a special person, place or thing and begins with a capital letter
(George Washington, Chicago)
Activities for practice:
-Have students circle/highlight as many nouns as they can find in a newspaper article.
-Review plural noun spelling rules & name a singular noun in the home & have student practice spelling plural form.
-While driving have students look for signs and determine whether the signs describe common or proper nouns.
Science: This month we will begin our study of physical science with an exploration of matter and its properties. At the end of this unit students will be able to observe and describe properties of matter, compare and contrast forms of matter, explain the makeup of matter, determine the physical properties of matter using tools, use various instruments to collect data, and work collaboratively in groups. Our activities include comparing densities of different liquids, changing the buoyancy of objects, measuring mass, ordering and graphing mass, and measuring properties of various objects.
Social Studies: This month we will begin to look at the geography of communities. Our objectives for this unit are to describe how people adapt to and change the physical environment of their community, describe different landforms and how people interact with them, identify natural resources, explain how people can work to protect natural resources, and to summarize how people can take responsibility in caring for natural resources. Activities include creating a chapter foldable, writing a postcard describing a mountain or seaside community, using clay to model landforms, listing natural resources and how we use them, and sorting renewable and nonrenewable resources.
Writing
This month students will review the steps of the writing process (brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing) and apply these steps to each of our weekly writing activities. Examples of each writing assignment and step of the writing process will be modeled for students prior to their writing. Students will be peer and self editing, conferencing with myself, and publishing their writing in various ways.
Published writing assignments are usually displayed in the classroom or hallways for some time and then sent home graded through the use of a rubric in the brown envelope.
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