Ms. Deming’s Weekly Newsletter Last Week’s Happenings… November 30, 2015 Last Week’s Happenings… As many of you probably heard, my parents came into town for Thanksgiving and made a stop at the school to meet the kids. They spoiled them with pizza, drinks, and let them decorate their own cookies!

Happening This Week… Grammar Math Students will continue working on our multiplication unit. Students will learn how to use pictures, skip counting, repeated addition, and arrays to identify multiplication, finding rules and patterns in multiplication, multiplication properties, multiplying a one digit number by a multiple of ten, figuring out unknown multiplication equations, and one and two step multiplication problems. Please continue to help your child practice the math facts out of 2-12 that they have not mastered. Once they master, they will be doing multi digit multiplication, multiplying decimals, and long division. Reading This week we will continue with our nonfiction reading unit. Last week focused on finding the main idea of a paragraph in a nonfiction text. This week we will focus on finding the main idea of an entire nonfiction text. Students will take an assessment on finding the main idea on Wednesday. This will be taken as an informal grade. Students will then learn about different text structures of nonfiction texts (sequence, cause/effect, and compare/contrast). We will be teaching each text structure a different day so this will carry over into next week. Writing We will finish our Upping the Quality of Our Narratives Unit. I am finished teaching all mini-lesssons for this unit. Students will spend this week writing and publishing more stories by including skills they have learned throughout the unit. I gave them a checklist to use. They will choose their best narrative from this unit to turn in. Grammar This week the students will learn about run-on sentences. They will learn what a run-on sentence looks like. They will need to break run-on sentences into two separate sentences or add a word to join them together. Science- This week we will continue with our force and motion unit. Students will explore speed and slope by adjusting the slope to their ramp that they make for a car. Students will also explore speed and force by using a bowling ball and nerf ball. Social Studies- We will continue with our unit on citizenship. This week the students will continue to dig deeper into the three branches of government. Important Dates to know… -12/9-12/10 Third Grade Field Trip to Rosedale (Will have students write down which day our class is and time in their agenda by the end of the week). -12/9 Narrative writing piece (different than the first one they turned in) due for a formal grade -12/11 Last day of fall clusters -12/14 – 12/18 Scholastic Book Fair in media center -12/18 Cluster Expo -12/21 – 1/3 No School Winter Break Vocabulary Dates: -List 5 words introduced 12/7 and test 12/18 Spelling Dates: Group 1: New words introduced 12/2 and test 12/9 Group 2: New words introduced 12/3 and test 12/10 Group 3: New words introduced 12/4 and test 12/11 Assignment Due Dates this week: I will be collecting another narrative from students next Wednesday 12/9/15. They must have it published and an illustration complete. Depending on where your child stands, they may have to take home to finish by next week. Test & Quiz Dates this week: Reading informal assessment on finding the main idea of a nonfiction text (Wednesday 12/2/15) Social Studies quiz on 3 branches of government Friday 12/4/15 Notes from Ms. Deming  -Please continue to be patient with Powerschool (our online grading system). Each day we seem to continue to be having difficulties. Once it is up and running correctly, I will input all of the grades I have recorded into my paper gradebook. There will be mid-quarter progress reports going home, so there is no need to worry about not seeing your child’s grades until the end of the quarter. Hopefully we will get this resolved before the end of the week. -Please continue to do Compass Learning, Khan Academy, and practice your child’s math facts at home with them. Once they master, I will be working with them on enrichment. Important Information and Reminders To efficiently manage classroom items on the wish list, a sign up genius was created. The link is: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/60b0e4baeaa22ab9-deming. Please check it weekly!