Fall Party

Tomorrow we have a busy day in 3rd grade! We will be taking Reading Part 3 of the North Dakota State Assessment (today we took reading part 2) as well as having a visit from the Counselor, Mrs. Albrecht and celebrating our Fall party!  Thank you to all of the parents who volunteer their time and food for our spider craft!  Our class greatly appreciates it!

Today we took Reading Part 2 of the state assessment and we have some City of West Fargo firefighters coming to do a fire presentation this afternoon!  I hope to upload some pictures of Miss Argall's class and ours as we will be viewing this presentation together!

Happy early Halloween!

NDSA Testing

Congratulations! Your child has completed Reading Part 1 of NDSA (North Dakota State Assessment)!  3rd grade is the first year they take that assessment so it was a brand new thing for them.  Every 3rd grader in North Dakota is taking this test! Over the course of the next few weeks we will be taking a different part of the test every few days.  They did a great job today! 

Parent Teacher Conferences

A HUGE thank you to all of the parents and students who attended parent teacher conferences! It was so nice to meet each of you, hear your concerns, and share what we've been learning so far in 3rd grade!  I truly love teaching your 3rd graders everyday and look forward to all of the new learning that is happening!

Mrs. Joyce has hired a long-term substitute teacher for my maternity leave who has tons of experience--across a wide range of grade levels and specialty areas!  I'm very excited to have her work with our class during the time that I am away with the new baby!  My hope is to have her meet the class sometime before baby is born!

Please feel free to contact me if any conversations came up after conferences that you want to know more about!

Thanks for trusting me in the care and teaching of your children!

October News

Happy Monday! So many exciting new things to report on...


1. Today we began our Fargo Force Reading Incentive Program.  Please see the program guide your child brought home!  Each day, please record the amount of minutes read as well as your initials.  The students are working towards some awesome goals. We calculated it today, and we only need to read about 18 minutes each day outside of the school day to qualify for ALL of the incentives!! 

2. Students should still be recording their reading minutes on their Cats/Dogs Paws for Reading program forms. If you would only like to keep track of one, please have them return their Paws pages to me and I will get their minutes input!!

3.  Picture Day--Pictures will be taken this THURSDAY, October 4! Thank you to parents who have turned in your order forms.  If you haven't, please turn in by Tuesday afterschool so Kristie can process them for Scherling Photography. 

4.  United Way Change Drive/Red Ribbon Week--both are beginning this month. I will be sending more information home about these programs! 

5.  Book orders--I sent out October's book orders last Friday, along with our October calendar!  If you have access to ordering online @ www.scholastic.com/bookorders you can earn free $$$ towards your next online order--and we earn extra for our class as well!  Our class code is KWLYK.  https://orders.scholastic.com/KWYLK

6. Flat Stanley--Our Flat Stanley letters are finally being sent out this week.  Our class did a biography project last week that took much more time that I had planned for, so we were unable to completely finish our letters until Friday. 

7.  Parent-Teacher Conferences--These are coming up very quickly. I sent home a notice (on pink paper) today.  Please confirm and send back with your child as soon as possible.  I'm looking forward to meeting with each of you! If the time listed does not work, please let me know and I will see what I can do about rescheduling! 

8. As always--please feel free to e-mail me or call me with any questions or concerns!

Science Fun!!!

A note from Scientist (Miss) Argall:

 

In science our first unit focuses on Earth Materials. Last week we got to pretend to be geologist and study our own “Mock Rock.” We had to use different tools to look closely at all of the properties a rock has such as: color, shape, size, texture, and weight. The students are so excited to start breaking their rocks apart to see what truly makes up a rock.  Stay tuned for more pictures of our geologists at work! J

 

What a week it has been!

Here is a look at some of the things we did this week:

Cursive! The students are SOOOO excited to be learning cursive. Our goal this year is to learn how to form all the letters correctly and be able to read cursive fluently. Even though we aren't expected to master cursive, I anticipate that cursive will end up to be easier and neater for several students than printing. So far--so good! The students have been responding well to it! Almost every night, I will send home the sheet that we worked on that day (or the previous day).  Feel free to do more practice at home with your child, as we only allot about 5-10 minutes to this skill per day!

Characters & Setting! We've been digging deep the past few weeks looking at different ways of thinking about the characters and settings in all of the books that we are reading!  While you are reading with yo ur child at night, ask them more about the characters and the setting in their books!  I hope you will be impressed at their responses! We've also been drafting stories in writers workshop--using characters and setting as our foundation for our PERSONAL NARRATIVES!

Other topics we studied this week: how illustrations support the words in a story, words that end in -ing, 4 kinds of sentences (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory - yes, we used those words!), telling time on an analog clock (one with hands), measuring with inches and centimeters, and using tally marks and bar graphs to study data.

The coupon book fundraiser is in full swing! Westside will benefit $10 from every book sold!!! That's amazing!!! The students are very excited about the opportunity to earn money for their school and to earn prizes for their efforts. We talked about polite, safe, and strategic sales strategies and prepped the materials. Please consider purchasing one and helping your son or daughter to sell a few more. The coupons inside are FABULOUS, so I'm sure it won't be hard to "get rid" of them! **I'm gearing up to use one of the many coupons that Cherry Berry has included!

 I've been asking the students almost daily and our current classrom count is at 65--over half way to earning a pizza party! As a classroom, if we sell 100 books, we earn a pizza party. 

Hope your work week is wrapping up well. I'm looking forward to celebrating my 4 year wedding anniversary with my husband tonight! As for the weekend--I hope to have plenty of walks to the Shadowwood Park near our home and lots and lots of relaxing!

Thank you for sending your children everyday! I am enjoying getting to know each of them better!  They keep me on my toes and keep me laughing! 

 

Everyday Math & Raz-Kids

I hope you all had a restful weekend!  I was able to spend the majority of the weekend away at Fish Lake with some family.  I finished up the binding on a quilt that I have been working on for our new baby due in November!  I also enjoyed watching my husband learn how to sail in his uncle's sailboat--very interesting with the wind we had! :)

On Friday, our class spent some time in the computer lab getting aquainted with two educational websites that are available to them for curriculum support. I taped the internet login information into their home folders so they can access the websites at home as well as at school.

Everyday Mathematics:  everydaymathonline.com
Raz-Kids: raz-kids.com

During the next week, I will also be giving each of the students access to Book Adventure.  Hundreds of books in our school library have reading levels and quizzes aligned with them.  Each of the students can choose to check those books out to help improve their independent reading comprehension.  After a student finishes reading a "BA" book, they can log-in and take a quiz to earn points!  You can find this website @ bookadventure.com

Please e-mail or call if you have questions about any of these things!