It’s Finally Starting to Feel Like Fall!

Dear Third Grade Families,
Can you believe October has already passed? With the changing of the weather, we’ve had a few everyday changes as well. Third Graders received new lunch tables this week and will be getting new desk spots once November begins.

In writing, our personal narratives are coming to a close! We have tried our hand at writing concluding sentences that are either:
– using juicy language
– show action
– cliff hangers
– filled with dialogue
– asking a question
and more! We finished revising our “sloppy copies” and will be rewriting our final copies early next week. These narratives will be shared with each of you during conferences on either Thursday, November 9 or Monday, November 13.

With our Social Studies, year-long theme revolving around New York State, we began our exploration of the state by learning more about a waterway that is vital to the five-borough’s history — The Hudson River! Alisa, engaged the class in conversations about the river, from the river’s source at Lake Tear of the Clouds (on the shoulder of Mount Marcy) to the mouth of the river at the Upper Bay near the southern tip of Manhattan (before the Atlantic Ocean). Students brought in prior knowledge of the river, such as its length, the varying widths throughout the river, and the fact that it is polluted. Through exploring maps of the river and reading pages from Peter Lourie’s book Hudson River: An Adventure From the Mountains to the Sea, Third Graders learned how far north the river actually stretches, and that each section of the river has different natural features, as well as a gradual development of civilization as you move down the river. Over the weekend, ask your student how the Upper River (by Mount Marcy), Middle River (near Albany) and Lower River (between Dutchess County to the Five Boroughs) differ from each other!

In math, we began our addition unit with numbers up to 10,000. During September and October, students have worked on using different strategies to show that they understand how addition works. Now, we will be allowing students to use the stacking method (or towering the addends of our equation vertically). Our main expectation for stacking is that students remember to line up their numbers from right to left. This week, we talked about how difficult it would be to add if they don’t match up each place value accurately.
For example:

  7,529
+ 438
We related the direction we go in for adding to reading Hebrew — both go from right to left!

Over the past two weeks we have worked on two different aspects of reading comprehension: making connections and summarizing. During read alouds, Third Graders showed that they have a very strong understanding of text-to-self connections. Making connections between texts is little more difficult, and thus we will continue working on this throughout the school year. When we summarize, we started to use this acronym to support student understanding:
Somebody (a character)
Wants (a goal he/she/it wants to achieve)
But (a problem the character faces, stopping her/him/it from achieving said goal)
So (how does it/she/he try to solve the problem)
Then (how does it end?)
We first used a mentor text from writing, Come On, Rain, by Karen Hess, to practice this strategy. We discussed how the main character, Tessie, really wanted rain that wasn’t coming. So she kept wishing and hoping, while trying to survive the “boiling heat,” until it finally rained. We also read aloud Smudge Face, which is a Eastern Woodland Native American version of Cinderella. Some of the illustrations we saw connect closely with our next Social Studies unit, in which we will begin reading Native American legends more thoroughly.

Some dates to remember:
November 9 and 13 — Parent Teacher Conferences
November 15 — field trip to The American Museum of Natural History

Shabbat Shalom to all!
Best,
Hilary and Alisa

Judaic Studies with Aliza

This week, third graders received their Chavruta, their learning partners for Chumash. They test drove their new partnerships by looking up hidden words together in the Chumash text, also practicing their ability to find a word by its Hebrew chapter and verse letter. We also got started on looking into the Chumash text in our workbooks and highlighting vocabulary words, character names, places, and word roots. Next week, we will return to our Food Justice project! Shabbat Shalom.