March Newsletter

LITERACY:

The passage from our Metacognition News on the blog seems to describe synthesizing perfectly: “Synthesizing takes the process of summarizing one step further. Instead of just restating the important points from text, synthesizing involves combining ideas and allowing an evolving understanding of text. Synthesizing is creating original insights, perspectives, and understandings by reflecting on text(s) and merging elements from text and existing schema.” Synthesizing requires the use of many strategies learned throughout the year. We will focus on this strategy in April. During this time, students will be learning how to identify multiple perspectives while creating opinions or arguments. Students will also practice identifying the theme or big idea of a piece. They will then communicate text evidence used to support the theme or big idea. Synthesizing also requires readers to use evidence from the text in support of personal meaning. We will encourage students to communicate how their thinking evolves from the beginning to the end of a passage or unit of study.

Opinion Writing:

In writing we have started to work on Opinion Writing. To start the unit, third graders have created bold opinions and written them in a form of a thesis statement. Students have learned that persuasive writers look at their world and imagine how it could be better to grow ideas for possible writing projects. We have looked for problems that needed to be addressed and imagined solutions. Students are really enjoying that their voices are being heard and that they are starting to learn how to justify their opinions to persuade others.  

Math: Parts of a Whole Can Be Modeled and Represented in Different Ways 

Students have begun to develop an understanding of fractions as numbers. We will begin to start solving problems, describing fractions as numbers on a number line, and explaining equivalence of fractions. Through all activities, our class is using critical thinking to make sense of problems and demonstrating resiliency when persevering in solving them. This requires them to interpret, evaluate, summarize and synthesize every day!

Social Studies: Civics

 Students will learn the important roles of citizenship and the difference between their rights, roles and responsibilities. Along with this, we will discuss the basics of local government. Some of these mini lessons include; an introduction of our laws, the process of how laws get passed, types of consequences for decisions made for following/not following the law and how they can play a role in their community to name a few.  

IMPORTANT DATES:

March 8: Parent Teacher Conferences

March 15: Parent Teacher Conferences

March 17-April 2: Spring Break

April 4-6-: PARCC Literacy Testing (8:50am-10:20am) 

April 10-13:PARCC Math Testing (1:15-2:15)