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March 1, 2010 Dear Parents, We hope everyone had a wonderful vacation week! Your child’s February letter is coming home for you to read today. We hope you will enjoy reading it! In reading class, we have been learning about the importance of making inferences when reading a story or article. We have practiced using our own background knowledge as well as text and picture clues to help us draw our own conclusions about story events and character traits. For example, we recently read several articles about the Titanic, and worked hard to infer whether the Titanic tragedy could have been prevented. We searched for clues in the articles we read and used our own knowledge about the Titanic and icebergs to help us make good judgments. The children know how important it is to think critically when reading, and that sometimes means looking beyond just what an author writes. To really understand and enjoy a story, making inferences, or “reading between the lines”, is a very important skill. In math class, we are finishing up unit six. Unit six was geometry and we focused on different types of line segments like parallel lines, intersecting lines, and perpendicular lines. We also learned more about the line of symmetry and what it means to have a symmetrical shape. Lastly, we learned about three-dimensional shapes. We learned how to name the different parts of the shapes like faces, bases, vertices, and edges. For social studies, we have been researching specific colonial jobs in the library. We have been focusing on one job per partnership and becoming the experts on these jobs! We will be presenting our research to the class later this month. Science has been so exciting for us! We have become chemists whose job is eventually determine what the powder substance is. In order to do this, we have an ongoing experiment with the powders and adding other substances to see the reactions. We are really enjoying this unit on chemistry. We are also now beginning to discuss the upcoming MCAS tests that third graders in our state are required to take. The children will be taking the reading MCAS tests on March 24 and 25. Over the next couple of weeks we will be taking some practice tests in school so that we may better develop our test-taking skills and gain a better understanding of what to expect on the tests. Your child will be bringing some of these practice tests home, so that you can also see what they are like. We’d also like to take this opportunity to remind you to sign up for a spring conference. The conference schedules are posted at our school office, so if you have not yet done so, please stop by there soon to sign up for a time for us to meet. If you are not able to come into school to sign up, please send us an email or give us a call so that we can assist you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you soon!
Mrs.
Durkin and Ms. Bayek
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