Hadden's Happenings

Classroom news for the week of February 23^rd

Reminders:

Tuesday: STAAR Ready for reading administered this day for all 3^rd grade

Wednesday: Engineering Day

Thursday: No Library Day this week

February 25^th – Talent Show

Please check Kathy Caraway website for school-wide events

Language Arts:

Spelling words: nap, neck, need, nice, nine, nothing, number, outside, page, pail, path, pay, peas, pen, pencil

Writing Workshop: This week we will complete writing our research papers and they will be posted in the hallway by the beginning of next week.  Our focus is writing our final drafts and designing our cover.  I had hoped to have this finished last week, but we need to extend it one more week! J

Reading Workshop: This week we will continue our unit on “Looking Through the Informational Lens”.  We will continue to practice how to summarize nonfiction using who, what, when, where, why and how strategy.  We will also learn about homophones and continue practicing our strategies with different reading passages.

Math: Last week we focused on learning multiplication and division strategies for 9’s and this week we will continue with our 6’s.  I encourage all my students to work on memorizing their math facts daily!  Although we use strategies to help the children figure out how to solve, our ultimate goal in math facts is memory! J

Social Studies:  This week we will continue our unit on “The Free Enterprise System in our World: Thinking Like an Economist”.  This week we will focus on personal finances and the children will begin a really fun simulation where they will think about what they want to be when they grow up and see if they can live within a budget.  

We will also have an Engineering Day on Wednesday where the students will get to visit two different speakers in our grade level and participate in two different science activities during the morning hours of that day.

Hadden's Happenings

Classroom news for the week of February 15^th

Reminders:

Monday- Student Holiday/Teacher workday

Thursday: Library Day

February 24^th – Engineering Day (email going home from the school about the details)

February 25^th – Talent Show

Please check Kathy Caraway website for school-wide events

Language Arts:

Spelling words: left, life, line, listen, lost, loud, march, mark, matter, mean, meat, meet, middle,most mouth

Writing Workshop: This week we will complete writing our research papers and they will be posted in the hallway by the beginning of next week.  Our focus is writing paragraphs using the information we researched the previous two weeks.  The students will edit and revise before writing the final.

Reading Workshop: This week we will continue our unit on “Looking Through the Informational Lens”.  We will complete our work from last week on main idea and details and begin learning how to summarize nonfiction using who, what, when, where, why and how strategy.  We will also learn about homophones.

Math: We will take our unit test on equivalent fractions and begin our multiplication and division unit with the 6’s and 9’s.  The students will learn different strategies for nines and sixes.  They will also practice using the facts in word problems.

Social Studies:  This week we will begin our unit on “The Free Enterprise System in our World: Thinking Like an Economist”.  This week we will focus on personal finances and the children will begin a really fun simulation where they will think about what they want to be when they grow up and see if they can live within a budget.  

Hadden's Happenings

Classroom learning for the week of February 1^st-5^th

^{Reminders for the week:}

Tuesday, February 1^st – PTA Meeting

Wednesday, February 3^rd- Early Release Day

Thursday, February 4^th - Library Day

February 9^th – Field Trip to Stunt Ranch

Language Arts:

Spelling Words:

hall, hang, heavy, herself, hid, himself, hole, hundred, hung, hungry, kept, kick, kill, king, kiss

Reading Workshop:

• This week we will finish our unit on drama
•  Elements of drama: drama, plot, characters/cast, scripts, dialogue, plot, theme, narrator, setting
•  Introduce Reader’s Theater and assign plays
•  If time permits, design props
•  Perform the plays for the classroom and kindergarten buddy class

Writing Workshop:

• We completed our Pourguoi Tales and they are hanging in the hallway
• Synonyms and Antonyms
• We will begin our Country Research Paper
• Students will brainstorm and choose the country they want to research
• Begin researching the country of their choice

Math:

• Continue our unit on Fractions
•  Identify equivalent fractions
•  Equivalent fractions with area model
•  Equivalent fractions on a number line
• Equivalent fractions using a fraction strip

Science:

• ·      Begin our unit 7: Environments: Characteristics and Changes
• ·        Organisms depend on living and nonliving things in their environment for survival

• ·        Environments have physical characteristics that support groups of organisms in an ecosystem
• ·        Physical characteristics of an environment include weather conditions and sources of water and shelter
• ·        A food chain represents the flow of energy in an ecosystem

Hadden's Happenings

Classroom learning for the week of January 25^th – 29^th

Language Arts:

Spelling Words:

few, field, fight, finger, foot, fresh, front, fur, gift, gold, gone, gray, grew, hair, half

Reading Workshop:

• This week we will begin our unit on drama
•  Elements of drama: drama, plot, characters/cast, scripts, dialogue, plot, theme, narrator, setting
•  Introduce Reader’s Theater and assign plays
•  If time permits, design props
•  Perform the plays for the classroom and kindergarten buddy class

Writing Workshop:

• Pourguoi Tales
• Complete first drafts
•  Edit, revise
• Write final draft
• Share with the class

Math:

• Complete geometry unit
• Take unit test and DCA
• Begin our unit on Fractions
•  Identify equivalent fractions
•  Equivalent fractions with area model
•  Equivalent fractions on a number line
• Equivalent fractions using a fraction strip

Social Studies:

• This week we will complete our unit on “Thinking like a Geographer”
• Each day we will visit a location (city) using a PowerPoint presentation
• Students will take notes about each city and create a “World Community Tour”

Hadden's Happenings

News for the week of January 18^th  - 22^nd

Monday: No School, holiday

Thursday: Library Day

Language Arts:

Spelling words: dream, drop, dry, dust, early, east, edge, else, enough, even, eye, family, feather, feel felt

Writing Workshop:

·       Introduce pourquoi tales

·       Listen and read different pourquoi tales

·       Students will begin writing their 1^st draft for pourquoi tales

Reading Workshop:

·       Read myths and identify sensory language to develop imagery

·       Introduce fables and identify theme

·       Read different fables throughout the week and identify theme

Math:

We will begin our unit on deepening understanding of sorting and classifying 2-D and 3-D figures and connecting area to multiplication

·       Explain and understand area

·       Explore area using with square units

·       Using multiplication to calculate area

·       Decomposing composite shares to calculate area

·       Review and assessment on Friday

Social Studies:

We will begin our unit on thinking like a geographer

·       What is a gropgrapher

·       Compass Rose and intermediate directions

·       Fun activities to explore directions

·       Weather, Climate and Forces of Nature

Hadden's Happenings

Blog for the week of: January 11^th – 15^th

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Spelling words for this week:

1.        cool

2.       count

3.      country

4.      course

5.      cover

6.      creek

7.       cross

8.      cup

9.      dead

10.   dear

11.      deer

12.    desk

13.    different

14.    dime

15.    dirty

Writing Workshop:

*Complete writing our first draft for our autobiographies (for those that didn’t finish this week)

*Revise and edit our autobiographies

*Write our final autobiography (Will be displayed in the hallway)

Reading Workshop:

We will begin our unit on Traveling Through Traditional Tales

*Legends and character traits (infer)

*Legends and interaction/Relationship of character and changes they undergo

*Myths and Compare/Contrast Settings

*Myth characteristics

Science:

*Learn and compare different landforms

*Explore fast and slow changes (processes) to our Earth

*Volcano/earthquakes

Math:

*Introducing the eights multiplication facts

*Reinforcing the eights facts

*Solving word problems involving multiplication (eights, ones and zeros)