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Dear Parents,
Watch out! Here come the eight year olds -- full of energy, imagination, and little sense of their own limits.
Eight year olds tend to gravitate toward their own gender when making choices about working and playing with others. On the playground, the waves of boys chasing girls or girls chasing boys are often eight year olds. Both boys and girls enjoy virtually any kind of humor, including riddles, limericks, and knock-knock jokes.
A key developmental struggle is gaining competence over the tools of their trade. At home, support is needed in such areas as handwriting, handcrafts, computer skills, drawing and sketching, and simple geometry. When accomplishments don't come easily or quickly, there is a strong sense of inferiority. Patience is not common in eight year olds.
Often parents and teachers lament about an eight year old, "he could do it if he only tried." "She's lazy and unmotivated." "He never sticks to anything more than a day." The eight year old is actually exploring his potential. He is struggling with feelings of inferiority as he tries out one new area after another in an expanding awareness of the broader world. Encourage independence rather than doing for your child what they can do for themselves.
We hope you find this information helpful in getting your child ready for third grade. For additional resources on how you can best support your child's learning please take a look at Yardsticks by Chip Woods.
(Adapted from Yardsticks, by Chip Woods)
Third Grade is an important transitional year between the primary and intermediate grades. To make the most of their school experience, we expect our third grade students to:
- Work cooperatively and productively in groups
- Be developing organizational strategies
- Utilize an adult pencil grip
- Copy from the board
- Be ready for cursive writing
- Handle increasingly complex assignments
- Be developing independent reading habits
- Read lengthier stories with increasingly descriptive language
- Use drafts and revisions
- Transition to traditional spelling
- Use a dictionary
- Be competent in the basic addition and subtraction facts to 18
- Skip count 2's, 5's, 10's
- solve one-step word problems
- Be ready for multiplication
- Have a good knowledge of community (town, state, country)
ACTIVITIES THAT CAN BE DONE AT ANYTIME WITH YOUR CHILD:
- Encourage conversation -- be an active listener
- Encourage reading -- quiet time at home, trips to the library
- Engage your child in writing -- grocery lists, telephone messages, friendly letters, thank you notes, stories on the computer
- Play board and card games
- Turn every day situations into an opportunity to build number sense
- Use educational computer games that teach all subjects including keyboarding
- Seek out on-line educational sites
- Realize the importance of giving your child responsibilities to develop independence and self-worth (chores, family tasks, sibling care, etc.)
Compiled by the LaGrange Elementary School Action Team
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