To help your student learn organizational skills, please check their homework planner daily. Homework should be checked and placed in their homework folder. Developing good organizational skills is a key to success in school. Please practice math facts for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with your child throughout the year. Fact triangles are a great way to reinforce these operations. Creating some problems which involve real life situations,such as "How much change do I have in my pocket?", is another important way you can reinforce the skills we are working on in class. Also, please help your child become a life long reader and lover of literature. Set aside at least 20 minutes of quiet reading time for your child to explore the books he or she enjoys reading. Good readers become good writers, spellers, and thinkers! WHAT ARE WE WORKING ON IN CLASS? MATH - We are working with many math skills. The children have been reviewing and mastering their addition and subtraction facts. For the few facts that still need to be mastered, fact triangles are the best skill builder. Each fact triangle teaches the relationship between addition and subtraction fact families. We have also practiced place value skills with whole numbers, telling time, and working with money. Students have used number grids to reinforce our facts. They are also looking at number patterns and reviewing measurement skills. Daily homework in math reinforces the skills we have been studying in class. We have started working on our multiplication and division facts. Practice at home with fact triangles. Story problems are an excellent way to apply the skills we work on in class. We have also worked with measurement - perimeter, area, and measuring with a ruler. The students are also studying place value of larger numbers, as well as decimal amounts. READING AND WRITING - Encourage your child to read a variety of books at home to help strengthen their reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Have your child talk about some of the books that we share in class. The children should try to make connections between the books they are reading and experiences from their own lives. In class we will read many different genres throughout the year. In READER'S WORKSHOP the children are enjoying reading stories in the genre of realistic fiction. We are currently reviewing and applying our reading strategies. The students are making excellent connections between what they read and their own experiences. The children enjoy reading a variety of genres in class, including adventure stories. We will begin reading biographies to expand our skills with informational texts. In WRITER'S WORKSHOP the students are working on "small moment" stories from their own lives. These stories explore the writing style of the personal narrative. Throughout the year the students will become excellent storytellers. We are also working on factual writing,learning how to write non-fiction pieces. The third graders are switching classes for SCIENCE and SOCIAL STUDIES. Check with your child for homework assignments and tests in these subject areas. In SOCIAL STUDIES the students in third grade are learning about communities and map skills. We are currently learning about Native Americans, making the connection between natural resources and how these groups lived in their environments. In SCIENCE the children are learning about magnetism.