It’s April! Only 7 and ½ weeks to go until summer—can you believe that?!! Even though summer is close, we still have MANY big and important things to do before we get there.
Check out the many fun and exciting things that will be happening in our classroom this month:
Language Arts
To review reference sources, each child will create a neat dictionary entry on themselves and it will be set up just like any other dictionary entry with pronunciation, part of speech, definitions, etc. We’ll put this on a schoolhouse paper with doors that open up to a picture of the person. These will definitely go in our memory books!
We’ll continue to work on homophones and homonyms, sentence structure, and using reference sources appropriately.
Writing
To go along with our rocks/minerals unit in science, the kids will revisit personification to write about their pet rocks.
We’ll also hit personal narratives again since we haven’t worked on these in awhile. Kids, and adults too, love to write about what we’re most familiar with—ourselves. We’ll work on collecting more seeds (ideas) and writing seed stories about moments that have happened in our lives.
Spelling/Word Study
Each student gets his/her list every Monday morning and puts a copy in the agenda. The list changes every week as students progress through spelling stages. Every student should be practicing their words and spelling patterns at home at least one or two nights a week in order to keep up with learning the new patterns, words, and word meanings. We are also doing at least 4 spelling activity in class each week. This activity involves things such as: writing their spelling words in sentences, sorting their words into spelling patterns, hunting for others words that follow the same spelling pattern, finding synonyms/antonyms for words, putting them in ABC order, and so much more. Please visit the “Reading/writing/word work” tab on my website to find a link to a website entitled
Spelling City. Many of our spelling lists are online and the kids can do many activities to practice their spelling words from home!

Reading
We will wrap up our biography study early this month. Students’ biography projects are due Friday, April 13 th . Each student will share his/her poem and facts.
We will continue our reading instruction using toolkit lessons that focus on determining importance. This unit focuses on putting together facts, questions, and responses, recording the important ideas, targeting key information, distinguishing your thinking from the author’s, and pulling main ideas from the supporting details. Basically, I’ll be working with students on noticing the important parts of a text and identifying the main idea. We took a break from toolkit to focus on other reading activities such as biographies and buckle down, and now we’re back with it going strong!
We’ve completely finished Buckle Down after this week along with 2 CRT practice tests. I’ll send this workbook home on Friday for you to do with as you please.
The class is doing great on their reading minutes. Congratulations to those students that have read 6,000 minutes or more! After this week, each student should have read at least
2,900 minutes. The expectation is 100 reading minutes every week. Ask your child what the rewards are for reaching each 1,000 level mark…
Everyday Mathematics
We have made it through the first 8 Units in the Everyday Mathematics series. We are currently in the middle of Unit 9—Multiplication and Division. We’ve taken a 2 week break from this as well to review important math concepts from earlier in the year. In this unit, we’ll learn about multiplying/dividing with multiples of 10, 100, and 1,000, using mental math to multiply, factors of whole numbers, double/triple digit multiplication, positive and negative numbers, and money sharing. It will be a great, but tough, unit! We’ll also begin
Unit 10—Measurement and Data in which students will work with length, volume, weight, capacity, finding the mean, and working with coordinate grids.
Some at-home, do-anytime activities that could correlate with these units (Unit 9 and 10) include: o Ask your child how many 10s are in 30, 50, 100, 1,000 and so on. o Take out different objects such as buttons, counters, pennies, and paperclips. Divide them into 3 equal groups. How many are in each group? How many are left over?
Etc. o Discuss positive and negative numbers and their application to real life situations. o Pose some different multiplication problems and have your child show you how to solve them. (Ex. 23 x 4, 100 x 5, 44 x 86, etc.) o Review equivalent names for measurements. “How many cups are in a pint?” o Name items around the house that weigh less than 5 lbs, 10 lbs, 10 lbs, and 20 lbs.
Check the weight on a scale.
Please continue to work with your child nightly on their Home Link assignments.
Also, use flash cards or other tools to get multiplication facts (0-12) down quickly
and efficiently. By now, students should easily accomplish a 100 multiplication and/or division test in 5 minutes or less. They will need this skill from here on out in math so they quicker they get it down, the better.

Science
We are finally ready to begin our final unit of this year—Rocks and Minerals. The goals of this unit include knowing that:
 rocks are aggregates of minerals, and they may also contain organic matter
 different rocks have different properties
 properties of rocks reflect the way they were formed and the minerals in them
 each mineral is composed of only one substance
 minerals differ in color, texture, smell, luster, hardness, shape, etc.
 properties of rocks and minerals determine how they are used
The unit will expose the students to field tests in which they perform various tests on the
12 different minerals. In the end, the students will attempt to identify which mineral is which by comparing their field test results to what they know about what each mineral. It will be like a long, guessing experiment to find out which mineral is which!
A really fun part of our unit is making our pet rocks. Please help your child find a rock of any shape or color that is big enough to decorate and place wiggly eyes, but small enough to sit comfortably in his/her hand. The more unique the rock, the better. It is exciting to see all the different types of rocks that come in. For this project, we will need several white paint markers and any colored sharpie or paint markers we can receive. The children will decorate their rocks, we will photo them, write personification stories about them, and generally have a blast working with our pet rocks.
Also, our class plans to have a Cowan’s Rock/Mineral Museum on one of our tables. It would be great about the first of next week, if the children could begin to bring in one or two rocks/minerals they would like to share with the class during the rock unit. I’ll label your child’s rocks, so at the end, all the rocks and minerals will go back home along with your child’s pet rock.
Social Studies
In social studies, we finished the study of communities over time (history). It was very enjoyable for the kids to relate the lives of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to the start of our country. The definitely got into it to say the least!
We’ll now move into our last unit of study for this year—Working in Communities. This unit will cover workers and consumers, how businesses work, trading, inventions, forms of money, free market economies, and how to earn, spend, and save—basically all economical topics. We’ll learn a lot and then create a neat power point to share with you at Celebration of Learning in May! Any talk of economical topics at home would really help reinforce some of these new and foreign topics.
Reminders
 April 6 th —Dynamic Dads
 April 10 th /11 th —CRT testing
 April 16 th /17 th –BEAR testing
 April 18 th —Science Enrichment—12:35-1:30
 April 24 th —April Birthdays lunch in the classroom
 May 4 th —A Blast from the Past presentation in the cafeteria

 May 10 th —Cowan Clubhouse Celebration of Learning—10:45-Lunch
 May 11 th —3 rd Grade fieldtrip to the Tulsa Shock
 May 23 rd —3 rd Grade class picnic
 May 24 th —Last day of school?? (Not official yet)
Games/toys for the prize box
The kids have come such a long way from where they were in August—I’m so proud of them! We still have many things to learn and do in the next few weeks, so I look forward to seeing even more greatness from them!
Thanks for all you do—you help to make my job a wonderful one!!
Colored and/or Black sharpies
Paint markers
Kleenex