WELCOME TO 2013!!!

 To all the families of 3M -- HAPPY NEW YEAR!  I hope you are having a wonderful start to the new year and are staying strong with those resolutions!  As your child may have mentioned already, there are quite a few changes in 3M.  To name a few:  basic facts timed test every Tuesday & Thursday, weekly reflections every Friday (signed by a parent due every Monday), a student teacher, race car math and a few others which you will see coming soon.  Thank you for being patient with our blog hiatus.  With report cards, conferences and the holiday season ... things were very busy but I am so happy to have stayed in touch with you via parent volunteers, conferences, emails, phone calls, etc.  Our classroom blog is not the only way to communicate and I am so happy we are all on the same page about that.  Below you will find some snapshots of what we have been in doing in the new year!  So many more to come ... enjoy!  

In Art class, Mrs, Sieme has bee using technology to show students how they can create art with the click of a mouse!  Lily Humphrey made me a picture using Picasso Head ... Lily knows me to too well to know that I love anything with hearts and a bit of love ... if only my husband knew that too!

Mrs. Sieme is working with Jeevan using Picasso Head.  Mrs. Sieme has a way of making sure every child feels like a Picasso.

Michael -- always smiling, always happy and always proud of his hard work!

Here is a snapshot of what the students see when working with this program.

Fiona, Emma, Tre and Owen worked hard usin  a reader's theater script on the solar system to practice reading with fluency, oral reading and reading with expression!  They did a marvelous job!

We have been working on reading comprehension skills using non-fiction text.  Skills such as the authors purpose, why writers write in certain ways, and how to put information from a non-fiction text.  Here is an example of using the text to compare & contrast different penguins using a Venn Diagram. Your children have been doing an excellent of going back into the text and finding the important information.  They have mastered the skill of re-reading and this has helped them to be able to make deeper sense of the text they read, both orally and written. 

 

 

 

 

We are well into our unit on multiplication ... which the kids LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!!!  You will find that your child memorizes their multiplication facts within weeks and yet some continue to struggle with their addition.subtraction facts that they have been working on for months!  This is because your child, like Maggie above, have been finding patterns and tricks in their multiplication book to help them understand and learn their facts!  You will see their book come home from time-to-time.

After students find the multiplication patterns of a multiple by coloring in their hundreds chart, they write down all the patterns they see using their words.  For example, they notice the multiples of 10 all end with a zero.  You will see in their book, the multiples of 11 & 12 are also presented to them ... THESE ARE ENRICHMENT!  Third graders are not expected to know or memorize their multiples of 11 & 12 however I want to enrich as much as possible and thus offer them to chance to do so.  Third graders ONLY need to memorize facts through the multiples of 10.  Does this make sense?

Welcome Megan Keeler!  She is our student teacher beginning on January 15th for 7 weeks.  She is coming to us from The College of St. Rose and will begin her first student teaching placement at Slingerlands School.