Collaborative3s

In Grade Three this week... Students continued to practice the reading strategies of “making connections” to improve their comprehension. As the students found “text to self” or “text to text” connections, they recorded them in their reading logs. As your child reads this weekend, ask them to share a connection they make. Students are becoming well-practiced authors. Over the past week, there has been great improvement in the students’ ability to create a story plan and use it to guide their story writing. After sharing ideas in groups and as a class, students independently created story plans based on their choice of two different picture prompts. When writing stories, the students continued to focus on having a beginning, middle, and end, using descriptive vocabulary, varying sentence length and beginnings, and conventions. Ask your child what their story was about. In math, students continued to practice addition of three digit numbers; they improved their abilit...

In Grade Three this week... Students had an opportunity to independently use a story planner to support them in the writing process. This week, students planned out two story ideas (using a picture prompt) and chose to write a narrative story about one of them. To support them in this process, students had talk time with their peers prior to planning out their story in an effort to support each other with generating ideas. During the writing process, students had time to work on their writing and used the posted criteria to support them. In our final step, students spent some time reviewing their written work and looking for evidence in their writing on how they met the focused criteria of adding details (who, what, when, where and why).  In addition,  this week students had an opportunity to explore various word games emphasizing word play, spelling and/or meanings of words (vocabulary). Students explored various addition strategies when finding the sum for 3...

In Grade Three this week... While reading, students continued to work on making connections as well as finding descriptive words that they could include in their writing. After whole class read alouds, the students identified the main parts of a story. They explained that stories include a beginning which introduces the characters and setting, the middle which often includes a problem or the main event, and the end which includes the solution. After reading two stories, Not Norman by Kelly Bennett and The Sandwich Swap by Kelly DiPucchio and Queen Rania of Jordan, students used a story map to write/draw these particular elements. After using this strategy when stories are read, students will now use the story map strategy to plan how they will write their own stories. As you read with your child this weekend, ask them to identify these elements of a story. Students continued to work with numbers to 1000. They created the greatest two and three digit num...

This week in grade 3… Students worked on two specific reading strategies. They focused on making connections; while students read, they were looking to make “text to self” and “text to text” connections. The students used sentence starters, such as “This book reminds me of….” to help them generate connections and when recording their ideas in their journals. After reading the story The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds, students made connections between this book and another story we have read in class. One student explained that he thought the two books were similar because the message in both stories is that we don’t have to be perfect. As your child reads a book this weekend, ask him/her to make a “text to self” or “text to text” connection. To celebrate Halloween this week, students continued to practice their writing skills, including descriptive language, by writing a story from a picture prompt of their choice. The students included descriptive words in thei...