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!

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 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 are learning to solve 2-step math problems. Consider the exdample in the picture below. It requires an extra step before finding out the total. Kids are being taught to read and understand the problem and tackle each step in order:

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!

Our thanks go out to Shrewsbury’s Officer Scott Mentzer! Officer Mentzer came in to read to us as part of the Rotary Club’s literacy outreach effort. He provided an excellent role model for lifelong learning through reading, and left us three new classroom books to enjoy!

This week students will be learning more about animal adaptations by dissecting owl pellets (sterilized)! Through this process, they will use scientific tools while asking questions and drawing conclusions about how and what owls eat. Kids can play along at home with this great Virtual Owl Pellet Dissection website!

Thanksgiving Week Changes: There will be no math and reading homework next week. There will be 2 optional challenge pages as usual, for kids wanting to keep exploring math skills. I hope you and your family have much to be thankful for this year, and I wish you the happiest of holidays!

 

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

Our CAFE focus this week is on summarizing by analyzing a character’s feelings. Reading is comprehending, and understanding the feelings of a main character helps us identify his/her motivation and reactions. We look to these as clues to determining the important parts in the story. Students will learn to summarize with familiar read alouds and to apply it in their independent reading.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?

At Friday’s School Meeting, students engaged with the ideas of inclusion, assertion, and kindness using the book The Invisible Boy (Ludwig, 2013). The book tells of a boy who feels unnoticed by his peers until someone comes along who includes him in his work and play. Our students shared their experiences and generated possible solutions for the boy and his classmates, developing their understanding of empathy. Here’s a version of it read aloud (Sami & Amro Reading Time via YouTube):

I look forward to our meeting this Tuesday! 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.

Fall Festival was a big hit! The kids had a blast making crafts, hearing stories, and learning about our state history via the Salem witches. Thanks to Sam Boardman, Darren Berge, Ying Chen, and Shwetha Adhikari for keeping the kids engaged and successful!

To complete our study of writing genres, students were introduced this week to Opinion Writing. This genre is at the heart of most collegiate and professional writing as we know it, in which an author presents arguments backed up with evidence. To begin with, students will be taught the difference between fact and opinion; how to craft an introduction and opinion; how to use an outline to scaffold their writing; and how to write in complete sentences with correct punctuation and capitalization.

The kids were treated to an amazing presentation given by animal rehabilitator Jim Parks, who brought us his Wingmasters program last 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 falcon! Thanks to our PTO for helping to sponsor this informative and exciting event.

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.

We’ll learn to use a different bar model for Parts-and-Totals, and for Comparison problems. Your Math Homework folder has a full explanation of the different kinds of bar models, to help if kids get stuck!