Welcome to Fall and a planet study for Science

Welcome to Fall!! Glad to be back at school and we hope you enjoyed your two days off!!

Housekeeping:
Monday, October 8, 2012: PLC Early Release
Thursday, October 11, 2012: End of first 6-week grading period
Thursday, October 11, 2012: AR reading goal deadline
Monday, October 15, 2012: Book Fair begins
Tuesday, October 16, 2012: Grandparents' Day last name A-M
Wednesday, October 17, 2012: Grandparents' Day last name N-Z
Thursday, October 18, 2012: Report Cards posted on Infinite Campus

Language Arts:
Last week there was a bit of a mix-up with the spelling list. We gave the correct test for the words which the students took home. But I posted the wrong test on the BLOG....silly me. So for this week, the spelling words are the same words that were on the BLOG last week. The spelling pattern focuses on long vowel with a silent e.

• smoke
• huge
• save
• life
• wide
• come
• mine
• grade
• smile
• note
• cube
• love
• escape
• slope

Our story this week is Lost and Found by Mark Teague. The students will love this story with a bit of a twist at the end.

Our third grade class is also participating in a writing pilot. Our students will be required to write and publish an informative piece on the solar system and the planets. The students have already chosen the planet they were interested in last Wednesday. The teachers will do a series of about 20 mini lessons as we go through the writing process. Each student is required to write about a planet of their choice from our solar system. This is our next big project. Thank you again for helping your students edit and polish their personal narrative stories.

Math:
I think we finally have subtraction strategies figured out. We had a quiz last Wednesday, and everybody did a great job!! We have about 5 more lessons to teach in this Unit as we will next tackle word problems with addition and subtraction.

Science:
As mentioned above, the students will begin to write an informative piece on our solar system and the planet of their choice. This entire process will be completed by November 12, 2012.

Social Studies:
Last week we started our study on communities and will continue to learn why communities begin and why people move to various locations.

Question of the Week:
What is the proper abbreviation for the word missus?

Also, We had a mini-lesson on plural possessives from our Daily Language. We were applying the correct punctuation to this sentence:
Several students notebooks in the classroom had lovely pictures in them.

In the above sentence, what is the correct way to punctuate students and show the proper possessive form?

Then a little girl in the class asked how to show the plural possessive form of fish. That is a tricky one because the plural form of fish is fish (within a species). When we are talking about fish from several species, the proper plural form is fishes ( I looked this up because I wasn't sure). Because fish has two plural forms, it also has two forms for the plural possessive. The possessive of fish is fish's; and the possessive of fishes is fishes'. So....we all learned something new today...at least I did!!!