Abernethy Elementary School

Welcome to Mr. H's 3rd Grade Class Website!

November 2011

Thanks for stopping by. Feel free to direct friends and relatives here to get a taste of what's happening in our class throughout the year.

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With Halloween behind us and Thanksgiving ahead, I feel like we're a pretty cohesive unit now. We know most of one another's preferences and quirks. We're having lots of fun and learning at a very good clip. Here is a bit of what's happening in our classroom.

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Our day always starts with silent reading and reader response. It's an opportunity for our students to engage the content of what they're reading. They bring good questions to the text and then write about what they are learning from it. It's a a great way for me to check writing fluency and comprehension.

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Our new math curriculum, Bridges, is a two-part daily math system that helps students master the thrid-grade math expectations through the use of our daily calendar and number corner as well as an extended math lesson each day. The students seem to really like it. With much of the review already out of the way, it's progressively getting more difficult and I'm noticing a few more furrowed brows during math time. As a teacher, these looks mean that we've entered uncomfortable space and good learning is underway. Keep me posted if you hear too much frustration at home!

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Each week we utilize our basal reader and then take a computerized comprehension/grammar/vocabulary test based on the story. The students seem to love it! If you want to keep pace with us, have your students use their username and passwords over at the Reading Street website. The students should be able to access everything at home. W have danced our way into the first seven chaapters of Charlottes Web. Again, A huge THANK YOU to Jessie Hesser for allowing me to steal much of her previous expertise to make this particular novel a huge learning opportunity and memory maker for our students.

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Writing is a slow, purposeful process of discovering our craft. We begin with sentences and looking at ways to be masterful with our words. We look at finding our "blah" words and replacing them with vivid imagry and colorful expression. Then we look at powerful emotions. These emotions are the foundation from which to write our personal narratives. I have to tell you, this is one of my favorite things about teaching third grade. We're well into our first personal narratives. We've taken a couple moments to look at mini-lessons regarding topic and suppporting sentences.

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We've also begun to try our hand at cursive, jumped into some geography, taken some lessons from our character education curriculum, and of course learned a couple of new silly songs to get singing together.

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The Halloween party was a huge success!!! Thank you, Room Parents!!! As usual, I appreciate all your support. I will continue to build on to the website this year. Keep checking back!

Mr. H.

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