Dear 3S Families, Thank you so much for cooking and coming to our 3S Russian Feast! The food was delicious, the dancing and singing fabulous and the PowerPoint presentations impressive! My class was really excited to share all of their knowledge with you; I hope you learned something new about Russia! Math MCAS for math will be on Monday May 11th and Tuesday May 12th . Good examples of the questions that will be asked on the MCAS have been included in the math homework sent home over the past several weeks. Looking over the homework with your child and talking about the different type of problems will help them perform more successfully on the assessment. Writing I am so excited to have Karen Goulet, our Literacy Specialist, helping with our Writing Workshop. We are currently working on telling the “internal” story in our personal narratives. This means we are discovering what the person is thinking or feeling on the inside and how we can express it in our writing. We have been looking at numerous writing samples and are working on adding our own inner stories to our writing. Our final writing unit is poetry. This is one of my favorite writing units and I know there will be some wonderful budding poets in this classroom! Reading Workshop We have been working on writing summaries in our Reader's Notebooks. We have reviewed how writing a summary is different from retelling a story. For example, in a summary not every detail from the story is included; you want to find the main ideas/events in the story while including the important characters and setting. When retelling a story, it is telling exactly what happened in the story. Writing summaries can be challenging, but 3S has been working hard and is up to the challenge. The biography reports were amazing! I was so impressed with the research and the costumes this class designed for their biographies. Our “visitors” ranged from Jane Goodall to Ben Franklin. If you happen to be in the building, don't miss the bulletin board outside the 3S classroom to see the impressive costumes and to learn a few facts from their biography reports. Social Studies After spending so much time in Russia, we have now come back to the United States to begin our study on Boston and Immigration. In this unit we learn about the treasures and cultures in Boston's different neighborhoods, and the important events that have made Boston the wonderful city it is today. We discover how Boston looked long ago and how it looks today. Students are usually shocked at how much Boston has changed! During the Immigration section of this unit, the class was asked to interview a member of their family to find out how and when their family or ancestors arrived in the United States. I hope these interviews fostered enriching conversations between you and your child at home. There are many events during the end of the school year so please be sure to check the calendar. Thank you for all of your continued support at home and in the classroom! Fondly, Miss Steele