October 27

Upcoming Dates/Reminders:

• I enjoyed meeting with many of you for conferences this week and look forward to meeting with everyone else on November 2.  It is such a joy to partner with your during your child's 3rd grade year.  
• Thank you to those of you who have so willingly covered books for me!  The kids and I appreciate you so and the kids are very happy readers!
• The Holland Sentinel ran an article about the FARM Lab that we were able to partcipate in last week.  You can check it out here.   Thank you to Steve Koeman to help make this all possible for the kids!  
• November 8 (Wednesday)- The Children's Advocacy Center will be coming to our classroom to talk to the kids about safe and unsafe touch.  A letter came home today explaining the details.  You are more than welcome to attend if you would like.  Our classroom presentation will be at 9:45.
• I sent home another book order set today.  If you are interested in ordering just click at the link at the top of the blog and it will direct you to my scholastic site.  If you are ordering for a gift send me an email and let me know so I can get the books to you.
• Swimming Lessons are November 15-December 1.  We will be at the pool from 1:40-2:15.  

Curriculum Highlights:

Literacy:  We concluded our unit on following characters into meaning this week with finishing the book Because of Winn-Dixie.  What a fun unit this was for the class and I know every student just loves reading right now!  Next week we will begin our series book clubs!  In writing we brainstormed first moment ideas, times when we felt strong emotions in order to start thinking our our topic for the second personal narrative.  We have also chosen what we want to improve on in our writing (some want better punctuation, dialogue, more detail, etc).  We are pushing ourselves as writers!

Bible:  We have gotten into the habit of bringing our Bibles to the rug first thing in the morning and reading our lesson from the Word.  This is such a nice start to our day.  This week we learned about the flood, God's faithfulness to Noah, and His sign of the covenant with the rainbow.

Math: In Math we have been busy practicing all of our multiplication and division facts from 0-10 to help us with our story problems.  Our word problems now involve all four operations in math and we need to read very carefully.  Next week we will begin two step story problems with the four operations.

Social Studies:  We have begun our study of the geography of Michigan.  This week we became geographers and learned what it means to be in a state.  We focused on location and learned about absolute and relative location when talking about Michigan.  We had a lot of fun exploring these concepts on Google Earth.

Have a great weekend!
Lynae

MUSIC NOTE FROM MRS. BOER - About once a quarter information about what we have been learning in music will appear in this blog. 

This quarter we learned....
*Two Songs of the Month - Salaam and Lord, Make Us Servants
*Our Theme Song - God of This City
*To keep a steady beat, even while we played different rhythms on Boomwhackers

*How many beats a quarter note, half note, and eighth note get

*Tempo