The Jungle Journal for the Week of 10/28/13

This Thursday at 10:00 our school will be participating in a drill to practice evacuating the school to our designated off site safe area.  Our evacuation site is Chets Creek Church and students will walk from the school to their building, be seated in designated areas for a short period of time, and then walk back to the school.  The drill should take no longer than one hour from start to finish.  During this time we will not be able to check students in or out and there will be no one at the school to answer the phone.  Please make arrangements accordingly.  Thank you for supporting us as we work to ensure that your children are safe.

Readers’ Workshop

Our work empathizing with characters is taking a slight shift this week.  Previously, our focus was “becoming” the character, creating mental movies and connecting emotionally to characters.  While this is, and will always be important, we are now working to grow ideas and theories.  Our work begins by recognizing that a character’s actions are a window into the sort of person he or she is.  With our work in Second Step, we have developed our ‘social intelligence’ that basically means the ability to read people well, to glean what they are thinking and feeling.  We are applying these skills to the characters in our books.

Students will receive their new BINGO board and response deadlines this week.  We will work to review Reading BINGO expectations and introduce new response options this week.

Writers’ Workshop

This week, we will continue our use of the ‘story mountain’ template to organize and plan out  our story’s structure.  This tool will help us to introduce the characters and setting, slowly build suspense toward a climax, and then work towards a resolution.  Ask your child how their story planning is going.  Students are welcome to bring their writing journal home to share their progress.

Reminders

Please send in bags of individually packaged candy for our Fall Carnival!  Also, we are still looking for parent volunteers for our carnival booth, the Soccer Kick.  Please let us know if you are available to work a shift!  We appreciate your support!

Skills

There will be no spelling or skills test this week. 

Math

We are continuing our unit about multiplication and division, called Equal Groups.  One way your child has explored multiplication is by skip counting.  You can continue to build on this work by asking questions such as the following:  What number would we land on if we counted by 4’s and everyone in our family said one number?  How many people would have counted by 3’s to reach 27?  Students are developing an understanding that we use multiplication to combine a number of equal groups and that we use division to split a quantity into equal groups.  Ask your child the following question: There are 4 spiders.   If each spider has 8 legs, how many legs are there? 

They will have a Math quiz on things that come in groups on Tuesday, October 29^th.  They can review workbook pages 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 to prepare.

Science

We are concluding our study of matter and how it can be described.  Students should know that properties of matter, such as mass, volume, length, and temperature can be measured and compared using tools.  Matter is anything that takes up space and has mass.  Properties of matter include shape, size, color, texture, and hardness.  Three states of matter are solid, liquid, and gas.  Matter changes states through heating and cooling.  Water melts, freezes, boils, evaporates, and condenses.  The students should review workbook pages 99-103, 105-107, and 109-113 to prepare for the end of unit assessment on Thursday, October 31^st.

Social Studies

There will be no Social Studies blue sheet or quiz this week.  

The Jungle Journal for the Week of 10/14/13

Readers’ Workshop

This week we continue our exploration of characters.  We will be recognizing how our personal experiences can help us understand and relate to characters on a deeper level.  It is important that students are not making superficial connections like “I have a dog, too,” or, “I’ve been to Texas, too.”  In this unit we are pushing students to recall a time when they have experienced a similar situation in order to draw upon their emotional memories.  This emotional connection to characters is what will help students empathize and connect to the text.  Student connections may begin, “This reminds me of…” and should transition into, “This makes me realize…(something about the character’s thoughts/feelings/motivations).”

Last Friday, students were given their first Brain Builder.  Each Friday from now on, students will be given a brief comprehension passage, or Brain Builder.  If students complete this passage carefully and demonstrate strategy use reviewed in class, they can earn Monkey Moolah.

Writers’ Workshop

Students will be writing a fictional story that explains an illustration in the book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.  After choosing the illustration they want to write about, students will learn how to use a planning tool called a story mountain.  The shape of the tool encourages rising and falling action to become a natural part of the story, with a main problem at the peak.  Look for more info on the blog!

Skills

Students should study and complete one of the homework options for list 6.  Our quiz will be Friday. The quiz will also cover our skills topic of the week, irregular past tense verbs.  Our daily skills sheet (in their ROAR folder) will serve as their study guide.  Please note that skills tests will now assess the current skill, as well as any past skills.  Skills addressed so far include

• Sentences vs. fragments
• Singular vs. plural nouns
• Possessive nouns
• Action verbs
• Past, present, future tense verbs 

Math

Our Unit 3 End of Unit Assessment is scheduled for Tuesday, October 15^th.  The topics covered during this unit include understanding place value, addition strategies, subtraction strategies, and being able to identify an equation to match a story problem.  Your child can review any of the sheets in Unit 3 of their Math workbook or yellow packet found in their ROAR folder to prepare.  Our next unit, beginning Wednesday, will focus on objects that come in groups, skip counting, and arrays to build an understanding of multiplication and division.  

Science

We are studying the three states of matter, solid, liquid, and gas.  We will recognize that water melts, freezes, boils, evaporates, and condenses.  Try this fun and easy at home lab:  Get two cups.  Fill each cup with the same amount of water.  Mark the water level.  Put one cup in the freezer.  Put the other cup on a shelf.  Observe what happens to the level of water in each cup after 12 hours.  If your child writes a short summary of what happened (or you can email us pictures!), they will earn Monkey Moolah.   

Social Studies

We are discussing the continents and oceans on our world map.  The quiz on Friday, October 18^th will cover two weeks of material, including last week's map skills. 

Narrative Memoirs: E.E.K.K.!!!

As we continue to work on our memoirs, we are proud of the way you have embraced the idea of making your ideas better through the writing of several drafts.  Many students began to notice that their rough draft was looking like a "sloppy copy" by the end of the week, as we continued to add more and more detail.  We also did a check to see if we were following the rules of writing (i.e. using appropriate capitalization and punctuation).  In many situations, being sloppy is a bad thing.  The messier your room is, the more unhappy your parents will become. But in writing, having a "sloppy copy," like the example pictured, is a good thing. It means you're thinking about how you can make your writing better, more clear, more detailed, and more grammatically correct.

Some of us can make changes to our writing and update our "sloppy copies" all on our own, but most writers need feedback.  We learned how to get feedback from peer partners by E.E.K.K.-ing!!!  Have you told your family about your eye-to-eye, knee-to-knee peer conference?  Have you thought about the compliment and suggestion your partner gave you?  Do you agree with their feedback?  Why or why not?  Check out these students getting feedback.

We will continue to E.E.K.K. with our partner this week, as we move toward publishing our narrative memoir.  Check out our rubric below.  This is our guide in ensuring our writing moves toward meeting third grade expectations! 

Nonfiction Narrative/Memoir Rubric

Narrative Element	Description of Narrative Element
Title & Focus	Related title is used and moment of overcoming a fear is mentioned
Engaging Beginning	Characters and setting have been introduced in an engaging manner
Story Structure & Sequence of Events	Beginning, Middle, and End that follows a chronological sequence of events
Details	True, exact details are used to create a picture in the mind of the reader
Closing	Ending wraps it up and reflects on lesson learned using an engaging format
Editing: C.U.P.S.	Corrections have been made to a 3rdgrade standard in capitalization, awkward wording, punctuation, and spelling

Author’s Comments: 

I am proud of_________________________________

I need to work on______________________________

The Jungle Journal for the Week of 10/7/13

Reminders

Field trip forms and $ are due October 11^th.

The Book Fair is this week!  Our class visit is Tuesday.  Students are welcome to bring money to shop during our visit.  Family Night is Tuesday from 5-8 PM.

Readers’ Workshop

It is essential that stories ignite a vital sort of imagination, one that allows readers to live inside the world of the story, to identify with the characters, seeing and sensing situations from inside the characters’ minds.  This week, we are beginning to focus on personal response, envisionment, and empathy to strengthen the connection between readers and characters.  One way of accomplishing this goal, is focusing on the mental movie playing in our minds as we read.  Ask your child what they envision as they complete their nightly reading.

Writers’ Workshop

This week we will work to edit our memoirs.  We will be using CUPS to help us as we edit our pieces.  C stands for capitalization, U stands for understandable, P stands for punctuation, and S stands for spelling.  Students will work with a peer and in teacher led small groups to make necessary changes to their pieces before we begin publishing our memoirs.

Skills

Students should study and complete one of the homework options for list 5.  This week’s list features homophones, so students will need to focus on correct spelling as well as the correct meaning of each word.  Our quiz will be Friday. The quiz will also cover our skills topic of the week, past, present, and future tense verbs.  Our daily skills sheet (in their ROAR folder) will serve as their study guide.

Math

The students are discovering different ways to find the difference between 2-digit numbers and 3-digit numbers, through travel problems.  They will have a Travel Story quiz on Wednesday, October 9^th.  Students should review Unit 3, pages 54, 55, 58, 59, and 62 in their workbook to prepare.  Some of the workbook pages have been completed in class and can be a study tool, while some of the pages are additional review.  Ask your child to explain their work to you, focusing on writing the equation that matches the story, finding the difference between two numbers, and jumping to landmark numbers.     

Science

We are exploring what matter is and how it can be measured.  Students should recognize that the properties of matter (mass, volume, length, and temperature) can be measured and compared using tools.  Matter is anything that takes up space and has mass.  Properties of matter include size, shape, color, texture, and hardness.  They will have a quiz over Chapter 3, Lessons 1 and 2 on Friday, October 11^th.  The students can review Lesson 1 (pages 99-103) and Lesson 2 (pages 105-107) in their Science workbook to prepare. 

Social Studies

This week we are learning how to read a map key and compass rose.  There will not be a quiz until next Friday, October 18^th.