NECAP Testing and a 4 Day Week!

Dear Families,

Your children have done an outstanding job continuing to work and focus on NECAP testing.  It is always tough when you have six days of testing (not only on the students, but on me as well!).  They have handled it with grace and maturity. Last week, students took the Reading portion of the exam, while this week the focus is on mathematics.  The best thing you can do to support your child is make sure they get plenty of rest and have a chance to eat a good breakfast before coming in every morning. 

It has been an exciting time in our classroom recently, as we have really started to delve into our curriculum.  The days of focusing on our routines and procedures to get back into our school rhythm are over.  

In literacy, students have continued their work with metacognition, reader's responses and fluency (accuracy, rate, expression). They have been practicing their ability to look back to find evidence in the text to support their thinking.  Students have also been practicing their ability to ask and answer two part inferential questions based on the text. Another exciting development in third grade is the addition of a grade wide author study project! Third grade teachers got together last week to develop a common unit on an author study.  Though the authors may differ from class to class, or group to group, the elements studied throughout the unit will be a shared experience.  This work will help students to better analyze work with common themes, characters, settings, etc. throughout a variety of texts/genres.

In math, students have worked on many strategies to solve addition problems.  Ask them about decomposing numbers, the partial sums algorithm, the identity property, the commutative property and the associative property. They have also used their knowledge of math terminology to help them justify and explain their solutions.  These same techniques and skills will be used as we continue into subtraction.  Continued practice with fast fact fluency at home can greatly assist your students' success here at BES.

In social studies, we have continued our study of geography.  We have learned about the seven continents, the major oceans of the world and basic map skills.  We will be moving towards a focus on the continent of North America.

Please remember to check out our photo gallery to see pictures of your students hard at work!

Enjoy your long weekend and enjoy the two, four day weeks we have ahead of us!

Love,
Ms. Allison