Mrs. Gooding’sClass News
January 2013

Can you believe the year is half over??!! I hope you all enjoyed the holiday season. I’m looking forward to a productive and fun last half of the year with this wonderful group of students!

Check out the many fun and exciting things that will be happening in our classroom this month:

Language Arts

Now that we have fully tackled both punctuation marks and the parts of speech, we will move into working with sentences and their correct structure. We’ll take a look this month at identifying subject and predicate, writing simple and compound sentences, how to correct sentence fragments and run-on sentences, and some various ways to correctly combine two sentences that are too wordy on their own.

Writing

Starting January 7th, we will continue our Writer’s Workshop each day as we begin workon opinion writing. The students will brainstorm their favorite restaurants and write a piece giving their opinion on why it is the best restaurant. We will take a step by step approach to writing this piece, focusing on one paragraph at a time.

Spelling/Word Study

I reassessed spelling progress the last week of school in December and am continuing to meet the students on their individual spelling needs. We’ll start new lists the week of Jan. 7th. Every studentshould be practicing their words and spelling patterns at home at least one or two nights a week in order to keep up with learning the new patterns, words, and word meanings. We are also doing at least 4 spelling activity in class each week. This activity involves things such as: writing their spelling words in sentences, sorting their words into spelling patterns, hunting for others words that follow the same spelling pattern, finding synonyms/antonyms for words, putting them in ABC order, and so much more. Please visit the “Reading/writing/word work” tab on my website to find a link to a website entitled Spelling City. All of our spelling lists are online and the kids can do many activities to practice their spelling words from home!

Reading

We will begin working through the review workbook entitled Buckle Down. You may hear your child talk about this as we’ll be working on it from now until the OCCT state test in April. This book helps students hone in on and review the basic reading skills necessary for this age level.

We will also spend some time reviewing the concepts we learned the first semester to ensure they have fully grasped those concepts.

The class is doing WONDERFUL on their reading minutes. We will continue those this week.

Everyday Mathematics

We have made it through the first 5 Units in the Everyday Mathematics series. We are currently beginning Unit 6—Geometry.In this unit, we’ll learn about line segments, lines, rays, parallel and intersecting lines, angles and turns, triangles, quadrangles, polygons, drawing and measuring angles, lines of symmetry and explore polyhedrons. We should be testing on this unit near the end of this month and then we’ll move to Unit 7—Multiplication and Division.

Some at-home, do-anytime activities that could correlate with this unit include:

  • Search for geometric figures with your child. Identify figures by name, if possible, and talk about their characteristics. For example, a stop sign is an octagon, with 8 sides and 8 angles. It is also a regular polygon because all sides and angles are the same.
  • Have your child use a protractor to draw a design using only acute angles (less than 90 degrees). Other designs can be made using obtuse angles (between 90 and 180 degrees) and right angles (90 degrees).

Please continue to work with your child nightly on their Home Link assignments. Also, use flash cards or other tools to get multiplication facts (0-12) down quickly and efficiently.

Science

It’s time to start our second science kit—Plant Growth and Development!! This unit helps kids see the process and life cycle of plants from seed all the way back to seed. Some of the unit goals include learning that:

  • Plants follow a life cycle that begins with growth from a seed and proceeds through the production of seeds.
  • Plants have distinct stages in their life cycles.
  • To live and grow, plants need light, water, and nutrients from the soil.
  • Many plants are pollinated by bees.
  • One seed produces one plant; one plant can produce many seeds.

Our lessons this month will involve many hands on activities such as seeing what’s inside a seed, planting, thinning and transplanting, observing growth, exploring bees and their functions, pollinating flowers, making a bee model, etc. The kids will love all this!

Social Studies

We will begin our study of Oklahoma this month. We will be looking at the early people of Oklahoma including the Clovis People, Spiro Mounds, Early Tribes as well as the Early Explorers of our state.

Reminders

  • Report cards home—Thursday, Jan. 10th
  • No School, Holiday—Monday, Jan. 21st
  • Late Start at 10:40 a.m.—collaboration day—Thursday, Jan. 31st

Please know that I am working on turning these wonderful 3rd graders into students ready for 4th grade. As this year progresses, my expectations for behavior, responsibility, and work quality increase. I always appreciate your strong support at home as well!

Thanks for all you do!!

Thank you,

Marjorie Gooding