Mrs. Watson's Weekly: Busy Short Week!

Last week has been extremely busy. We are loving our new read aloud, Jack Plank, by Natalie Babbitt. Jack is an out of work pirate trying to find work. He is living in Mrs. Delfresno's boarding house and each night he sits down at the table and explains why is not able to take a certain job. We have been discussing good reading strategies during our read aloud time, such as monitoring and fixing up, slowing down and reading with accuracy, and looking for interesting words.

In math, we worked on multiplication and looking for patterns as we learn our facts. There are trick and patterns and strategies galore! All products of 9 add up to 9! 9 X 2 = 18 ( 1 + 8= 9) 5 X 9 = 45 (4 + 5 = 9) 9 X 12 = 108 (1 + 0 + 8 = 9) Wow! The tens are super easy to learn as all multiples of 10 end in zero! That means all multiple of 10 are equal and so are multiples of 2! So cool!

The Common Core details 8 Standards for Mathematical practice. Here they are!

"Huh?" you ask! As do many third graders!

So instead we look at them in third grade friendly language.

MP.7 (Mathematical Practice 7) says that "We look for and make use of structure." As third graders we prefer....

These kid friendly "I can ..." statements are located in our classroom and we reference them often. Yes, we can see patterns in multiplication!

In reading we are working on our Daily 5. Each day we have five choices of activities to choose from as we work. Guided reading, when students read with me (not actually a choice), independent reading, read with someone else, listen to reading (RazKids), write about reading, and word work. We are doing a great job getting this up in running in Room 102. I have started to meet with reading groups and the kids are enjoying the choice time as well.

Grammar... We are still working on using correct capitalization and punctuation. We have completed mini lessons on common and proper nouns, the four types of sentences, and writing a complete

sentence. Please remind your child that a complete sentence is a complete thought. We will continue to review this at school. We have worked on identifying the subject and predicate in a sentence. This work will continue this week.

Open Circle: Our school uses the Open Circle social competency curriculum developed by Pamela Seigle. This program is part of Wellesley College's Wellesley Center for Women. It was designed to help proactively develop children's skills for recognizing and managing emotion, empathy, positive relationships, and problem solving. It uses a common vocabulary that we use in our school for expectations of student behavior. We are doing Open Circle in our class each Thursday. The lessons we have addressed to date have been identifying Double D behaviors (those that are dangerous and destructive), dealing with annoying behaviors, non-verbal signals, and listening skills. Ask your child about any of these topics!

an example of not so good listening..

an example of excellent listening (and looking!)

Finally, we had a great trip to Plimoth Plantation! Thank you to our 5 chaperones who joined us: Mr. Ryan, Mrs. Ameden, Mrs. Whiting, Mr. Cira, and Mrs. Ravech. Check out the pictures we took.