The fundraiser pick up will be this Wednesday and there will be no school on Friday.
Have a good week!
Mrs. Miller
Good Evening! I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend. I spent my Saturday with my family watching the new Thor movie that was released this week, and now have settled into my school work that needs to be finished for Monday. This week we will be finishing our first multiplication chapter in math, introducing division, and continuing to practice memorizing our facts. In reading we will be reading about the young Thomas Edison and learning about his inventions. We will be having our vision screenings this week and the class will start to work on writing personal narratives.
The fundraiser pick up will be this Wednesday and there will be no school on Friday. Have a good week! Mrs. Miller
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Good Stormy Evening! I love listening to the thunder roll outside...it almost sounds like spring. I hope everyone is having a peaceful weekend and have had time to spend with your family. I was able to celebrate my mother in laws 88th birthday and my dad's 69th. I am thankful everyday for the blessings I have been given in my family.
Our class has added new members to our family as well. I would like to welcome Serenity and Josie to our class. It has been a great week getting to know the girls and helping them learn our class routines. We have a very busy week ahead of us in third grade. In math we will be finishing up our reteaching and extension activities, then retesting over chapter 3. I will also be introducing multiplication. As we start multiplication, now is a great time to be making fact cards or starting to practice memorizing multiplication facts. There are some great computer resources available to practice these facts. Check out the student links page on our website, I have several sites there for the kids to practice math in an interactive way. In social studies we will be finishing our Tonganoxie brochure, and we have started our unit on government. Students will be learning about the different branches of the government this week, with a focus on the executive branch. This week in reading we will be reading a folktale called The Harvest Birds. We will compare this story to the companion folktale in our basal reader. The main comprehension skill will be focusing in on describing the characters and the moral that is being taught in the folktale. On Friday we will be celebrating Halloween in our classroom from 8:30-9:00. Beth Eaton has graciously volunteered to plan the morning for us. Thank you Beth! Enjoy the rest of your evening! Missy Miller Good afternoon! Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers this last week as my mom spent some time in the hospital and I had the joy of being able to help out my dad. I am glad to say that mom was able to come home, with some new medications and lots of follow up visits planned, on Friday. I was able to return home to my family as well. On Saturday, I was scheduled to run my first ever 5K and ended it with a broken foot. So, in the next couple of weeks, I will be hobbling around the classroom and learning how to maneuver on crutches...could be very comical.
I will be calling this week to talk to each of you about your child's progress this first quarter. You can go into Skyward to check your child's individual grades and I will be sending home supplemental paperwork that I would have given each of you at the conference. You will receive a work habits report which will tell you how your child behaves and stays on task during class time. You will also find their current reading level and how it compares to a typical third grader. I will also be send home each student's baseline MAP assessment scores. As a staff we are still learning how we will use the information to guide our instruction in the classroom. We will be using these assessments to show growth in each student. If you prefer a face to face conference, please email me at [email protected] so we can set up a time during my plan time or after school. This week we will be learning about the elements of plot in the literature that we read. In math, we will finish up chapter 3 on subtraction, test on Wednesday, and then have our follow up WIN groups for reteaching and enriching toward the end of the week. The class will then begin multiplication the following week. We would like to welcome two new students to our classroom on Monday. I am excited about getting to know them and having them become part of our classroom family. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and I look forward to speaking with all of you this week. Missy Miller Good Morning! We are off to a good start this week in third grade. We started our week with an assembly about the PTC fundraiser. The kiddos can earn some great prizes and help our school build a stem lab (science, technology, and math lab), or add to our playground area. Here a few highlights for the week.
Historical Museum Field Trip: Next Monday, the 9th we will be heading in the morning to the Tonganoxie Historical Museum. Our class will load the bus at 9 and return to school by 11:50. Kids need to bring a lunch or will get the sack lunch they ordered from school. We will be eating upon returning to school in our classroom. If you are a parent volunteer, please meet us at the museum chapel about 9:20 Monday morning. Mrs. Murray will be there for me as I will be attending a regional math training conference that day. Please remember no siblings should attend the field trip that day. Conferences: Conferences are just around the corner. If you have not signed up for a time with me yet, please call Tammy Bennett in the office to get on the schedule. I truly enjoy spending time with each of you and discussing how your child is progressing and helping them to set goals for the remaining of the school year. See you then!! Reading: This week our whole group learning target will be sequencing events during a story. This is sometimes difficult as students have to identify events that are relevant and then put them into order to help understand the story. This learning target also includes understanding other story elements like the setting, and characters who are represented in the story. Math: We are continuing to work on subtracting numbers through 1,000. We will wrap the chapter up next week and test on Tuesday. Please review with your child. I will send home a "study guide", homework activity on Monday for review. Halloween Party: We are quickly approaching our day for the Halloween Party in class. Our scheduled time frame will be 8:30-9:00 on Friday, October 27th. Have a great rest of the week! I will update the blog after conferences. Missy Miller Good Evening! I hope all of you have had a wonderful Saturday. I was busy cleaning my house, and now working on school business. This upcoming week will be busy with our field trip and MAP Testing.
Field Trip: Tuesday afternoon we will head downtown to visit our local community. If you are a parent volunteer, please be at the classroom by 12:35. We will return to school about 2:45. Students and adults need to wear comfortable walking shoes. Feel free to send a disposable water bottle with your child for the day. Please label with your child's name. The kiddos will not need a lunch for this trip as we will have normal lunch that day. If it is raining the trip will be cancelled and will not be made up. MAP Testing: This week we will be administering the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) assessment. This assessment is unique as it will start all students at the same level and will adjust according to their ability. If they get a question correct, the next question will be a little more difficult. If they miss a question, then they will get an easier question. This test will be able to help us as teachers really pinpoint areas where your child needs help or areas where they excel. It will help us to plan and see growth. The test will be given 3 times a year in the fall, winter, and spring. I am excited about this assessment as the data it will give will be reliable and useful for instruction. I will be sharing results from the testing during our conference time. The office sent home a more detailed explanation of the MAP Test on Friday. Conference Schedule: Conference sign-ups went home on Friday. Please fill those out and return to school as soon as possible as time slots are filled on a first returned basis. Math: This week we finished up our addition unit and tested on Thursday. Some of our class is still struggling with rounding and adding accurately. We will be addressing this in the first few days this week and students will get the opportunity to retest for their final grade. I will send home both tests once we are finished. Please review rounding with your kiddos. This is a new concept in third grade and it can be tricky. Over the last several years I have noticed that all third graders struggle, but by the end of the year, they get it. So, if your child is still struggling, know that we will continue to work on the concept in small groups. Our next chapter in math will be working on subtraction 3 & 4 digit numbers with regrouping. In this chapter we will work on using rounding to estimate differences, subtracting, finding the missing addend using fact families, and determining if an exact answer or an estimate is needed when working word problems. Language Arts: Due to our testing and field trip this week, our teaching team has decided to not have a new reading story or spelling list this week. Our class will be focusing on our Tonganoxie brochure project that is tied into our community unit. Students have started research about our awesome community, it's history, current attractions, government entities, and quick facts. We will be creating a colored brochure highlighting the research that we are doing. I am hoping to have all the writing, editing, and publishing done by conference time so they can be displayed for all to see. We have also been learning about sentences, identifying the subjects and predicates. This past week we learned about proper and common nouns and that nouns make the simple subject in a sentence. We will continue our work with grammar, looking at plural nouns and how to form those plurals. Missing Assignments & End of quarter: We are quickly approaching the end of the quarter. You can always check your child's grades and assignment through Skyward. If your child has an asterisks for an assignment there are a couple of things you need to check...is the assignment being counted as a no count or is the assignment missing. If it is a no count, then your child does not need to make that assignment up. I give no count assignments when they have been pulled out maybe for speech, or another activity and the work does not need to be made up. If the assignment is missing, then they will need to get it turned in as missing assignments will become zeros as we near the end of the quarter. If your child is missing assignments, then I have or will be giving them extra copies and it is there responsibility to get it turned in as soon as possible. Good Morning! I walked into the classroom this morning and realized I hadn't posted from last week. We had a great week in third grade. I finished all the benchmark testing and I am excited to start reading groups this week. I have also been spending some time thinking about how I can differentiate and help some of our kiddos who are struggling and some that are bored with whole group instruction as they already have a good grasp on the concepts being taught...especially in math. Starting today we will be trying to incorporate a guided math format in our math time frame. I will start with a short 10-15 minute mini-lesson, then I will meet with all kiddos in a 20 minute teaching session. This way, I can differentiate for all the students within my classroom. Students will rotate between our Reflex program (math facts in a fun way), seeing me, at your seat (completing the assignment for the day), and hands on games that reinforce skills that have been previously taught in the class. I have used this format before and I feel it is highly successful if I have a big enough time chunk to meet all the needs of the groups. I believe it can be done this year, so we are going to give it a whirl.
In reading this week, we will learn about how cause and effect can help us to understand the text. The class will also be learning the basics of literal and figurative language within a text. It will be a busy week for sure! Have a great day! Mrs. Miller On Friday, September 8th our class welcomed our grandparents to come and learn a little bit about what we do in the third grade. We started our time together with our 2nd afternoon recess. Students played soccer, basketball, climbed on the equipment, and spent time with their grandparents on the playground. Once returning to the classroom we took part in the marshmallow challenge. Each group was given the task to create the tallest tower that could hold a marshmallow at the top. They were given 15 pieces of spaghetti, one marshmallow, and about 1 ft of tape. They could break the spaghetti or the tape anyway their group decided, but they could not replace pieces. Students had a great time competing against each other, but the biggest kick was the competitiveness of some of our grandpas. We did not crown a winner, but the pictures below will tell the tale. Enjoy! Happy Sunday! I hope you are all enjoying the wonderful three day weekend! It seems to be flying by quicker than I would like. This week in third grade was busy. We finished our chapter on place value and tested on Friday. This year we are trying something a little different to make sure all students have mastered the material taught before moving on into our next unit of study. For each math chapter we have specific learning standards and we have set learning targets that the students need to master in order to successfully master the standard. For example in chapter 1 our standard says that all third graders will be able to round numbers through 1,000 to the nearest 10 and 100. In order to accomplish this goal students must have an understanding of the following concepts (learning targets). 1. Students must be able to identify, read, and write the place and value of any given number. 2. Students must be able to compare and order numbers according to their place value. 3. Students can successfully round to the nearest 10 and 100. When students test I will go back and look at each learning target and if your child scored under an 80% on any area on the test, then they will join in a group to reteach that area. Students who have mastered the material will be in a group that enriches what they have already learned. Students who have passed with an 80% or higher, but may have missed a few on the test will join a group that reinforces the learned skills. Each of the third grade teachers will take one of the groups and we will switch classes so each of the students gets what he or she may need. We call this rotation WIN (What I Need). After a couple of days reteaching, we will administer a 2nd assessment to those who didn't master the material. The higher of the two scores will be entered in the gradebook. If a child is still struggling with a concept, we will continue to review during our guided math time within our own classrooms. You will see a small piece of paper attached to your child's tests when they come home with the learning targets and how the fared on both tests. In reading this week we continued to work on developing our stamina for our Daily 5 activities that the students complete during guided reading time. The class has practiced reading to self, working on words (spelling), work on writing, and this week we learned the expectations for read to someone. This class aced it! I have some pictures showing the first couple of days of read to someone. They did a super job reading quietly and focusing on their reading...which is our goal, that all students become better readers! This week we also had a team challenge. Each group was asked to build the longest chain using only one piece of construction paper, scissors, and glue. They have 30 minutes to plan and then create their chain. I tried to stress that they had to make a decision together and work as a team. Here are some of our results. This week be looking for another team challenge...this time we will include our grandparents!
I look forward to meeting your families this Friday on Grandparents Day! Have a wonderful Labor Day and please be safe. Mrs. Miller Here we are at the end of our first full week of school. We earned our first extra recess for great behavior, learned the difference between standard, expanded and word forms of numbers, and we started working on how to write a paragraph. The class is off to a great start!
Next week we will be looking forward to our second week in our reading books. We will be reading The Trial of Cardigan Jones. He is a moose whose huge antlers have caused an uproar in the town where he lives. Our main comprehension skill this week will be working on using our inferencing skills to draw conclusions and answer questions from the story. The class has also been working on building reading, word work, and writing stamina for our daily 5 stations that happen during guided reading time. In spelling and language we will focus on long vowel patterns and types of sentences. I will be emphasizing the difference between a complete sentence and a sentence fragment. The class will finish up chapter 1 in math on place value and take our end of the chapter test on Friday. This week we will hit rounding hard. It is a difficult concept, so please talk to your kiddo about the steps in rounding a number to the nearest 10 and 100. We will continue our character building and writing unit in social studies. By Friday we will be ready to write about our summer vacations using what we have learned about writing a paragraph. We had a great first few days in third grade. The class spent time learning routines, working in groups, and preparing for learning in the upcoming year. Here are a few highlights! Fred the Worm: On Thursday the class participated in a cooperative group activity where they were given the following scenario. Fred the worm was traveling along the ocean in a boat. Unfortunately, the boat tipped and Fred was stuck on the top of the boat and his life preserver was under the boat, and he doesn't know how to swim. Each group was given the task to safely get Fred from the top of the boat into the life preserver using only 4 paperclips (they could not touch the worm, boat, or life preserver with their hands). The students spent 10 minutes or so making a plan of how they would attempt the rescue, then they went to work. Some groups had to change their plan in the middle of rescuing Fred and learned that it was okay to change the original ideas that they had. Others were successful the first time. Here are some pictures from our adventure. We also had an assembly on Friday where Mr. Poell shared TES' three main priorities: All students and staff are safe, relationships are built, and learning occurs. Then we dedicated two chairs that will be placed in the learning stairs of our school honoring Sarah Cartar who was a 2nd grade teacher that passed 5 years ago after battling cancer.
The class also reviewed the school handbook by having a scavenger hunt and sharing information that they found during the hunt. These handbooks should have come home on Friday. Please read as they cover policies for TES. There were several other items that we talked about this week that I thought parents will want to be aware of. 1. Planner Binders: Each day we fill out all assignment that have been assigned during the day. If the assignment is complete, then the students will highlight that assignment. If they didn't finish the assignment and need to finish it for homework, then the assignment should be left unhighlighted. This task is a huge learning curve for third graders, it sometimes takes them awhile to get the hang of what the expectations are for the planner. 2. Eclipse: On Monday students will receive NASA approved glasses to view the eclipse. In order to participate, students will need to have the green permission slip form returned on Monday. We will not spend a lot of time outside, as I want to make sure that all students are protected, but I do plan on viewing the eclipse during the day and checking in with the NASA live stream. 3. Spelling: Our first spelling list will come home on Monday. Students will have a copy of the list glued into their planners, a copy in the sheet protector in their binder (this sheet also has the reading vocabulary, and comprehension focus for the week on it), and they will have an activity copy that will be left at school in their spelling notebook. The list can be found on the side of this blog, as well as in the spelling folder at the top of the page. In the spelling folder I have the entire year saved in one document. Well, I feel I have become a little long winded tonight, so I will let you go. Have a great rest of your weekend and I look forward to seeing your sweet kiddos on Monday! Mrs. Miller |
Mrs. MillerI am Missy Miller and I teach third grade at Tonganoxie Elementary School. This week's spelling:Lesson 4
1. load 2. open 3. told 4. yellow 5. soak 6. shadow 7. foam 8. follow 9. glow 10. sold 11. window 12. coach 13. almost 14. throat 15. most 16. cold Challenge 17. tomorrow 18. sailboats Archives
September 2019
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