Happy Martin Luther King Day!! Hope you had a fun day!!

Housekeeping:
Monday, Jan. 21, 2013: Martin Luther Kind Day
Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013: Awards Assembly from 2:00 to 2:30

Congratulations to all students who have reached their AR goal for all of the grading periods!!



Congratulations to all students who have completed Fast Math addition.

Reading:
Last week all of the third grade students at Ellis took the Winter IRI. We had some amazing growth and great scores!! There will be some changes in our Title One groups and switch groups. We are gong to have a big push for the next 2 1/2 months as we prepare for the ISAT test and the Spring IRI. We have some great readers in our class. The new goals for AR have been set. The students need to be at 21% of their new goal by this coming Friday.

The story of the week is The Garden of Abdul Gasazi.  The students will be listening to the story and working on various skills. The spelling list for the week focuses on homophones or words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings:

• hear
• here
• new
• knew
• its
• it's
• hour
• our
• there
• their
• they're

The skill we will focus on is using verbs in the past and future tense. For example:
1) The small girl danced in the dance recital last night. (danced is past tense)
2) The small girl will dance at her practice tomorrow night (will dance is future tense)

Math
The students have learned the following multiplication facts:

• Zero is the KING
• One is like a mirror
• Two times a number means add that number twice (or make a double)
• 3x3=9
• 3x4=12 "One, two, three, four,....I like math let's do some more!!
• 4x4=16 "You have to be 16 years old to drive a 4x4 truck!!"
• 5 count-bys
• 10 count-bys

That is a lot of facts to know. We will continue to practice for several more weeks. We will also learn the basic concept of division along with the multiplication facts.

Science:
We started learning about Earth's resources last week. There are three things we cannot live without.

• air
• water
• food

This week we are going to learn about how much usable water the Earth has and how we can keep our water clean. We will learn about the Water Cycle and make a model of it in class. Each student will practice making a model in class, but will also be required to make a model of the Water Cycle at home. There have been some fabulous ideas over the past years. Water Cycles made out of cakes, candy, Lego's, terrariums, and wheel charts. This is a great science project for the students and helps them to learn the parts of the Water Cycle. I have already asked permission from Mrs. Whitehead to let our students display their water cycles in the Ellis Media Center. We will have some ideas to display for the students.



Question of the Week:
Make multiplication word problem for 3 x 6 = 18.
What are the factors (multipliers or partners) in this problem?
What is the product?

If macaroni and march were the guide words on a dictionary page, what word would be found on the page?

• marriage
• matchstick
• melody
• maps
• middle
• master