Time for our Authors to Publish their Work!

During writing, your children have been working very hard on their personal narrative writing pieces. We have studied authors and what good narrative writing includes. Each child picked from their list of ideas and small moment stories, one story that they felt most passionate about. We took that story through the writing process. First, they planned out the people, setting, and events. Then, we started at the beginning and wrote each event long. We crafted our beginnings to have a good lead to reel in our readers. At the end, we looked at a variety of books and found that strong endings include action, talk, or feeling. So, we crafted our endings to do just that! We revised to make sure our writing sounded the way we wanted it to. We even wrote with dialogue and details so our readers would be able to feel like they were present in our stories! Now the class has the option of typing their final pieces, or writing it again on final copy paper. Can't wait for you to see our final products!

Grandparent and Special Guest Day!

It was so wonderful to meet everyone's grandparents and special guests. There are so many people who love and care for each and everyone of you! For those of you who were unable to make it, I have a few video clips from each song that the third graders did. I hope you enjoy! 

Thank you to each and every one of you, the special people, in your child's life. It is because of you that your children are here at Dickinson school; and because of you that each and every day they come to school and work a little bit harder than the day before. While I hope that they learn a little bit from me each day, I also learn a lot from each of them! :)

Word Study:

Even though word study is only 20 minutes of our day. It is a very important 20 minutes. Studying words and understanding the way words are formed helps to formulate the knowledge we have to decode words while reading and also write words while composing our writing. Learning the English language is tough! But we have a GROWTH MINDSET about it and are constantly trying to stretch our brain and learn new words in order to become better readers and writers! 

Practice at home is equally as important!

At home to practice students should do ONE QUICK (about 5 minutes)  activity: blind sort, written blind sort, spell words out loud, alphabet magnet OR Scrabble tiles, make TWO sets of cards and play memory, rewrite each word in a sentence, type the words on a computer, go on a word hunt, create word puzzles - ideas are endless! 

***Find whatever way is most successful for your child to learn their words!

**TIPS - focus on the words you believe are challenging your child the most AND

look at how your child’s words are being formed**

Rocks and Minerals

We have begun our study of rocks and minerals. Today was our second day observing the physical characteristics of rocks. We are examining rocks looking at their color, texture, shape, size, weight, and any unique characteristics it may have (such as fossils). We have 12 different rocks to examine. The class is going to take what they know about these rocks and sort them into categories. They will do their best with what they know about each type of rock to attempt to sort them into sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic. I know that my 3rd grade scientists have it in them to find the clues!