Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Newsletter 4/15 - 4/26

Sending a thank-you to all of our great parent volunteers!  It has been a bonus for the students to have one-on-one help!  Your efforts are very much appreciated!

Testing-  We will begin practice testing this Friday.  On May 2 we will begin our official testing.  I will include the complete testing schedule below.  Please have your students here on the testing days, unless they are sick or you run into an emergency.  It is hard on the students when they have to make-up tests when they return.

Testing Schedule:

Friday, April 19th @ 1:00 pm/ Practice Language Arts 1
Tuesday, April 23rd @10:30 am/ Practice LA2
Monday, April 29th @ 10:30 am/ Practice Math 1
Tuesday, April 30th @ 2:30 pm/ Practice MA2

Official Testing Schedule:

Thursday, May 2nd @ 9:00 am/ LA1
Friday, May 3rd @12:30 pm/ LA2
Monday, May 6th @ 12:30/ MA1
Wednesday, May 8th @ 9:00 am/ MA2

*The third grade program is still planned for Tuesday, April 30th @ 2:00 pm in the school gym.  Families of the students are all invited.

Battle of the Books will be held on Friday May 17th.  Keep up the great work on your reading assignments!

Monday, May 20th will be the Reading Celebration.  The third grades will attend from 9:45-10:25 am.  That is, if we read the 1,000,000 minutes!  1,500,000 minutes will get Mr. Oldroyd to kiss a pig!

If you have any questions, please let me know.
Have a great week!

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Newsletter 2/1- 2/12

Hello Parents!
I hope you had a great break!  We are back with a big push to prepare for end-of-levels.  Here is our schedule of studies for the next couple of weeks:

Math- Measurement is the chapter we are studying right now.  The students are learning all about customary and metric measurement.  They will also learn more about area, perimeter and time.  The last chapter for the year will be on Data, Graphs, & Probability.  Please watch for alternative homework that will be sent home to prepare for our testing.  They will be in the form of cumulative reviews.
Thank you for your help with this!
Times Tables-  We still have opportunities to pass off times tables.  If your child is ready, they will need to let me know at school so I can pass them off.  We are also playing times tables games and reviewing the times tables every chance we get.

Language Arts/Reading- Continuation of Mountain Language, grammar lessons and small reading groups.  Daily 5 writing will also continue with our "Seasons" assignment.  The students are going through the writing process with a peer conference, teacher conference and three revisions before being published.  The published work will be typed in the computer lab.  I am so proud of the writing my students are producing!  After the writing assignment is completed, the students will return to the Read-to-Self and Read-to-Someone.  The word work and listening skills are continually being addressed on a daily basis.

Vocabulary-  We will continue vocabulary for one more week after this one.  At that point, we will study the whole list of words and play games to reinforce the words learned throughout the last several months.

Unit Study-  Mrs. Bradford just finished up a fabulous unit on force, gravity and simple machines.  She is now teaching a unit on the moon.  We will then study health and finish with a social studies geography unit.

Music- We are planning to have a 3rd grade musical program in the gym on April 30th at 2:00 p.m.
The students learn so much in their music class with Mrs. Leavitt and we would love to show off their skills to the parents.  We hope to see you there!

Art- We will be working on a few more art projects before school ends.   One of the favorites we will work on is the perspective drawing.

*Parent Volunteers- We will only have two more weeks for volunteers due to testing.  Thank you so much for your help this year.  It has made such a difference!