Learning To Go Mr. Avery's Class on the Web 

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I hope you all had a wonderful holiday! I spent some long delayed time catching up with friends and family. I had much to be thankful for, including this great bunch of students and families!

Winter’s on its way! Our classroom is in need of lots of bottles of hand sanitizer to keep us germ free. This is especially important because there is no sink in our room for students to wash our hands. Please send in a bottle or two, and thank you.

This week  marks the end of Trimester 1: we’re 1/3 of the way to grade 3! Students will be taking end-of-term assessments in writing, reading, math, science, and social studies. Report cards are due to come home just before the December break.

Our next area of study in math is multiplication. The focus for instruction is on recognizing that multiplication means adding equal groups of a set. Students will use objects, pictures, and symbols in order to show this addition. Then they will be taught the algorithm ___ x ___ = ___, in which the first number refers to the number of groups and the second number refers to the amount of objects which get added. For example, in 5 x 2 = 10, students should recognize that this means there are 5 groups of 2 objects which are added together to get 10 (illustrated below). At this time, there is no expectation that kids do this in their heads, only with support of objects and pictures.

Our life science work wraps up this week by teaching students to research information. Students have chosen a nocturnal animal in order to study its adaptations. They will read with a question in mind; tag relevant information; use organizers to write their ideas; and create a poster with realistic drawings, labels, and descriptions. Smart!

Thanksgiving Week Changes: There will be no math and reading homework next week. There is a math facts quiz on Tuesday, to help students try to level up, so quizzes and flash cards will come home this Friday. Also next week, our blog will be taking a break for Thanksgiving. I hope you and your family have much to be thankful for this year, and I wish you the happiest of holidays!

Our thanks go out to the Rotary Club of Shrewsbury! We were presented with a gift of 3 classroom books from Rotarian Mrs. Deane, a retired teacher herself! Mrs. Deane engaged students with a Q & A about the clubs good works, and read from the books we were given. We are grateful indeed.

Our CAFE focus this week is on Stop, Think, Paraphrase (STP). This year, students are learning to think about the text before, during, and after reading. This strategy is designed to get them to think about what was important information on each page they read. After reading a page, students should pause to reflect and summarize the important information in a sentence or two. It’s especially helpful when reading nonfiction, to help them understand the main idea and supporting details put forth by the author. Kids can practice at home with articles from Time for Kids and Sports Illustrated Kids! In the case of online articles, STP can be used after paragraphs.

Our work with bar modeling is paying off! Students are becoming adept at relating them to parts-and-total problems, using them to make sense of problems, and understanding numbers involved by drawing them bars with appropriate scale. This week we are learning to use bar models to make sense of comparison problems. The model looks different from before because our thinking about solving the problem should be different. For example, consider this problem:

Notice how setting up the model this way shows understanding of what “more than” means. Using our knowledge of the parts-and-total bar model previously taught, it makes it easy for kids to see that what is required to solve this problem is addition.

The same can be said of using modeling to make sense of “less than” problems:

Students who set up the problem correctly can immediately see that Susan’s amount is smaller than Rosa’s, and that subtraction is called for to solve it. Like a parts-and-total frame, we subtract the part (157) from the total (824) to get the remaining part. See how helpful a tool bar modeling is?

In writing this week, students will learn about the heart of writing narratives: the Main Event. This is where the young author should really stretch out the action and take the reader step-by-step through the event.

Consider how a good writer would tell about the following video. Instead of this: “I picked up the bat. The pitcher threw. I hit it,” good writing should sound more like this: “I grabbed the long, wooden bat and swung it up to my shoulder. The pitcher went through his warmup, smacking the ball in his glove to try to shake me. I dug my white high-tops into the dusty ground to show him I meant business.” See how the latter puts the reader in the picture? Try making up your own narrative to go with the video!

I look forward to our meeting this Thursday! If you still need an appointment, please contact me. I will share with you your child’s reading assessment, math tests, and writing samples, and I’ll discuss progress being made in those areas along with successes and any learning targets. Admittedly, our time is brief! Think of this as another step in our yearlong discussion of your child’s education, and know that I remain available for further communication.

What an amazing presentation was given by animal rehabilitator Jim Parks, who brought us his Wingmasters program this week. Students were highly engaged while learning more about adaptations that help local birds of prey survive. Using live specimens, Jim focused his interactive experience on nocturnal owls, as well as our school mascot: the peregrine falcon! Thanks to our PTO for helping to sponsor this informative and exciting event.

Rotary Readers are coming! In an effort to promote literacy across the town, Members of the Shrewsbury Rotary Club visit today and read to second graders using engaging picture books that are then donated to each classroom’s library! We’re grateful for the organization’s good works.

Our reading focus is on learning to use nonfiction text features to make sense of informative texts. Think about a magazine article you’ve recently seen. As accomplished readers, we never just dive in and hope we understand by the end of it; yet, that’s often what kids will do. Instead, we read and think about the title, headings and subheadings, pictures, diagrams, captions, maps, and all the other things that make concepts more comprehensible, all while relating them back to the main idea. This week we will learn many of these features, go hunting for them in text, and use them to improve comprehension. This Reading Mama’s blog puts it well (and is a good source for learning many elements of reading): http://thisreadingmama.com/comprehension/non-fiction/non-fiction-text-structure/  And you can practice using nonfiction text features to improve comprehension with your child by using magazines, websites, informational books, and at http://kids.nationalgeographic.com.

This week we begin a very important math unit. Chapter 4 focuses on bar models and using them to solve number problems and work algebraically. This way of doing math is extremely useful, and will benefit students greatly in the future when they apply it to multiplication, division,  fractions, measurement, and more!  As an example, consider the picture below as a way to model this problem: Jim is planning Thanksgiving dinner for 21 people. 15 people will be having turkey, and the rest are vegetarians. How many people will Jim plan a vegetarian meal for?

For students, setting this problem up can be tricky. We’ve learned to use parts and total boxes to model algebraic thinking: bar models are an even more explicit way to show our thinking about problems, one that helps us make sense of the numbers involved. Notice how the bars are drawn to scale in comparison to each other. This skill really requires students to understand the relative size of the numbers involved.

Your Math Homework folder has a full explanation of the different kinds of bar models. In addition, here is a GREAT site for students to practice the process! Click on the picture below and scroll down to select Part-Whole A (this week’s focus).