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Mrs.
Pippa's Class
January
Newsletter

Dear
Parents!!
Happy
New Year to everyone. I hope you and your families had a wonderful
holiday. The year is flying by so quickly. Now that January
is here we will be wrapping up many units of study in order to begin
preparing for the Connecicut Mastery Test.
Reading
Workshop and Writing Workshop
For
January we will continue with our non-fiction unit of study in both
Reading and Writing Workshop. In Reading Workshop
students will explore topics of interest such as animals, storms,
dinosaurs, and rocks and minerals. We will review
features of non-fiction text and will work on turning headings into
questions to guide our reading. Our main focus will
be on determining importance of text, finding the main idea and
supporting details, asking questions, using context clues to figure out
the meaning of unknown words, and re-reading when something does
not make sense.
The students will still continue their
fiction reading every morning for 20 minutes in school. They
should be reading every night at home for about 20 minutes and filling
out their reading log. Students will also be responsible
for writing a short response to their reading each night.
In Writing Workshop the students will continue preparing to
write Non-Fiction Picture books on a chosen Native American Tribe.
Students will research their tribe’s homes, food, jobs,
land, resources, etc. and decide on how to organize their information.
They will use non-fiction features to create their books along
with their information they gather. We will have a
display of their books in our very own third grade Native American
Museum for you to view on Friday January 23rd.
Students were also assigned a project
where they must create an artifact that goes along with their tribe
that they are writing their non-fiction picture book on. This
is an at home project. The project is due
on Thursday January 22nd.
Math
In Growing with Math we just finished topic
9, which was on division. Next we will be
working on topic 10: Collecting and Analyzing
Data
The students
will be responsible for mastering their multiplication and division
facts by 2’s 5’s and 10’s before March. They
need to know these facts for the CMT’s. We
are practicing flashcards in the classroom. Please
make sure your child is practicing at home as well. In addition
they can log onto study island at anytime.
This website is directly aligned to the CMT's. Some nights
your child will have to go onto this site for homework. I am able
to see how many minutes they are spending on it and which areas they
are mastering and areas in need of improvement. If you have any
questions or problems with signing on please let me know.
Science
We will begin our unit of
study on Rocks, Minerals, Fossils, and Earth's Natural Resources.
The Audubon Society will visit our classroom on Thursday so that the
students can practice testing rocks.