Keep on Rockin' in the Third Grade!

I hope you all had a marvelous weekend!

We have another amazing week coming up in third grade.  Here's the breakdown of what we'll be doing this week:

Reading Workshop:

We had a successful week last week with our character trait focus.  Students practiced this comprehension skill as a whole group and independently.

This week we will continue focusing on comprehension, but we will be using non-fiction texts.  Students will still be permitted (and encouraged) to read their fiction chapter books, as the skills transfer to fiction reading as well.  But, for learning the lessons and in-class practice, we will be using nonfiction materials.

We will be learning strategies to help us monitor our comprehension.  When readers monitor their comprehension, they keep track of their thinking while reading.  They listen to the voice in their head that speaks to them as they read.  They notice when the text makes sense and when it doesn't.  Students will learn to "fix up" their comprehension by using a variety of strategies including stopping to refocus thinking, rereading, and reading on.  To become independent, and thoughtful, readers need several strategies to call up when needed.  With practice, these monitoring lessons allow readers independently  figure out what their comprehension problem is and find the strategy to solve it.

WritingWorkshop and Social Studies:

We will continue practicing paragraphing while we finish up our final personal narrative pieces.  Writing Workshop and Social Studies will collide this week as we will be working with Ms. Emily's class on our "Research a State" project.  Students will work in pairs to research a state in a region of their choice.  Students will learn about state symbols, border states, state history, fun facts, landmarks, natural resources and more!  We will be using these amazing state boards for our resource:

These boards are full of information about each state.  Through this project, students will learn about their particular state and also non-fiction features, graphic organizing, synthesizing information and putting it into their own words, and paragraph writing.  This nonfiction paragraph writing will be expanded in our upcoming country study unit after Thanksgiving break.

Math:

In case you haven't heard, we are learning about measurement.  Last week we learned all about the metric system and its three basic units.  Shock of shocks, we learned about it via a song.  I posted a video of this song on our website http://melissasthirdgrade.weebly.com/ under the Metric System tab.

This week we'll be learning about the U.S. customary units of measurement, but I don't have a song for that...yet.

Fluency Poem:

This week's fluency poem is The Fifty Nifty United States by Ray Charles.  We have been working really hard on memorizing the states and have done pretty great so far.  We just really want to firm it up this week and our fluency poem is a fantastic way to to just that!  Here is a link to our favorite youtube version of the song:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb0eOmX7ZGw

That's all for now!  Thanks again for taking the time to read this blog.  I so appreciate you and all that you do!