Welcome to Grade Three!

Welcome to grade three! Apart from the Message Easy email, (which turned out to be far from easy as the first email did not send to everybody and I am still not sure why that happened), we have got off to a great start to grade three. Let me tell you a bit about what we have been doing in the classroom:

We have spent a lot of time with routines and safety. We practiced what to do if our end of day collection person was not where we expected. Please review this at home too, so your child knows to come back and find their teacher at the dismissal door. If their teacher is not there but another teacher is there, they should ask them for help. If it is a little late and no-one is there, to walk round the school and go in the office door to the office.

We spent some time doing really fun challenges. Ask your student about the cup stacking challenge and the toothpaste challenge. Through these challenges, we thought about how together we work more effectively and how we have to be careful how we treat each other so we don't hurt anyone's heart.

I am getting to know your students strengths and challenges. One thing I did was have your child write the numbers 1 - 20 and see if anyone needs any extra practice with number formation or backward letters. I did the same for upper and lower case alphabet. You can do the same task at home and work with your child if they don't yet know their alphabet by heart or are still prone to letter reversals. A few minutes of regular practice, if needed, would really help them at school.

We have started to think about friendly ten digit pairs, so if I say 6, the student will say 4. Getting to a stage where they 'just know' the number partner will help them greatly when we go on to adding. I find if students really master the small numbers, they find the big numbers much easier. We have started to learn some number games with dice to practice this.

We have been reviewing about what is a sentence and what is not. It can be hard to remember to begin with an upper case and end with punctuation AND not to have extra upper case letters within the sentence!

We have revised the three ways to read a book (look at the pictures, read the words and retell the story). We sorted the class library into fiction and non-fiction and chose between 5 and 10 books each for our book bins. Most of the students have not yet started reading with parents at home on a daily basis and I really encourage you to establish this practice. Even great readers benefit from reading with an adult. If your child is reluctant to read, then take turns, read to them or choose a more interesting book for them (more on that next week!) I know we all have very busy schedules but please find at least 15 minutes in your day to read together:)

Now.... what you really want to see - some pictures!