Language Arts
As I mentioned in a previous email, we have started reading the book Wonder by R.J. Palacio.
Over the past seven months, I have been working on teaching and reinforcing a variety of reading strategies focusing on fluency, accuracy, comprehension and expanding vocabulary. I will continue to reinforce these strategies in small group or one on one reading conferences. While we read Wonder, we are going to dig a bit deeper and look at some higher level comprehension strategies. Our students are maturing as readers and their reading experiences and strategies need to mature too. Reading comprehension involves the ability to not only read the lines but also the abstract step of "reading between the lines." Good readers have the ability to read beyond the lines and take away a deeper meaning and connection from a book.
I can't imagine a better book to introduce these new concepts and skills to my students. From past experience, students immediately connect with the main character, August Pullman. They become very protective of him and passionate about how he is treated. Just today, as I was reading to the students, they instantly fell silent after a few gasps, when another character in the book, Julian, was being rude to August. I asked them why they were upset and suddenly so quiet. The response was unanimous...they were upset that someone would be so mean to August. We are only on page 32 and they already have connected so deeply with the ten year old main character. Many discussions come from reading this story. We have already discussed white lies, bullying, how to stand up against a bully, how to handle seeing someone who has a physical abnormality and how our reactions affect them. We have and will continue to put ourselves in other characters' shoes and discuss how we would feel in various parts of the story.
In addition to reading an amazing book, we also finished up some pretty amazing stories of our own! At student led conferences you had an opportunity to read your child's first stuck story. The feedback I received from parents was positive, which is always great to hear! We had one final paragraph left to write and we finished that up last week. We will start planning our next story in the next week and start writing it shortly after. We are also going to take some time to write some poetry during poetry month.
Our new WTW groups are working hard through their newest sorts. I hope you found my email on Monday helpful when working with your child on their sort. Due to the increased challenge this week with their WTW words, we will not have WWW this week. I want the students to give all of their time and attention to WTW this week.
Math
Wow! Our students are super excited about multiplication!!! We have started our multiplication unit by discussing how you need equal groups to multiply.
We discussed how you can't make a multiplication sentence to count up a bunch of apples if there were 5 in one group, 3 in another group and 4 in the last group. All groups need to be equal with multiplication.
We have also discussed how multiplication is a short cut for repeated addition.
Today, I introduced the concept of arrays and their use with multiplication. An array is a set of rows with the same number in each row.
We will continue to work through this concept tomorrow. The students were very excited to look for arrays in their world! You should have seen their faces when they realized that not only is our tile floor an array, our ceiling tiles make an array, and better yet, their structures in Minecraft form arrays!!! They were blown away!
We have also started working on a few tricks to help them master their basic multiplication facts. In grade three, they need to master up to 5 x 5. So far we have learned that:
Anything times zero is zero.
Anything times one is the other number.
Multiplying by two gives you two choices. Either double the other number or count by twos while you touch the spots on the other number (Touch Math) or your fingers.
Multiply by five by counting by fives while you touch the spots on the other number (Touch Math) or your fingers.
Once they have mastered these facts, the only facts that are left are:
3 x 3 = 9
3 x 4 = 12
4 x 4 = 16
Your child should have brought home a math package with feedback on their progress in multi-digit addition and subtraction. If you have any concerns or questions about this please do not hesitate to contact me ASAP.
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