What's in the Forsman Future?
Hi all! This is a longer blog this week than normal because I wanted to share some information about general things to expect with each subject I teach. Feel free to scroll to the applicable subjects for your students. If your student doesn't see me for academics... it is still best to scroll down each week to make sure I don't have any general announcements, tips, resources, etc.
My academic classes will clean out the academic folders in class - feel free to look in them to see what we are doing, but if you could keep everything in there that would be great! The "Keep at Home" pocket can be cleaned out daily to keep the binders light and organized. Any homework they receive from me sure be in their "Homework/Bring Back to School" pocket and should be indicated on their assignment book.
Spelling
We will start with List #2 this year as we determined that List #1 was a bit too tricky. I will give a pretest on Tuesday (usually Mondays) and if the students get two or less wrong they will be on the challenge list. There will be an info sheet coming home Tuesday to explain the 3rd grade spelling program in more detail. There are 20 words each week. Some of my students are on modified spelling lists that have them working with 12 words for the week. They will still pretest on the 20 and then I will select their 12 for the week (hopefully building to 20 as the year progresses. The homework packet will also go home on Tuesday (usually Mondays) and will be due on Friday. They have all week to do this and it is not graded, but completion is recorded for the "homework bank" in the gradebook. The homework will always be a cursive sheet and 1 workbook page or ABC order unless they are on the challenge list. I like to encourage the students to complete as much of this in the time I give them at school as they can. We also work on a lot of phonics skills in spelling and do practice the words - but STUDYING IS NEEDED AT HOME to do well on the Friday tests. The tests are the only things besides the homework bank of points that determine the students' spelling grade for the report card each quarter.
Reading
Tuesday I will pass out the first reading calendar of the school year. In 3rd grade we encourage (at least) 20 minutes of reading a night. The calendar is a way to show us which days your student has done that. Any day that your student reads ANYTHING (magazines, joke books, comics, novels, picture books, etc.) or reads with you for at least 20 minutes, please initial in that day box. For each 2 boxes initialed, your student will earn 1 point. There are 10 possible points per month. That allows for days missed. I realize that all families have busy schedules and that this gets difficult. Just do what you can, the students that read here in school can also count that and a teacher or aide will initial to help. Next week, we are starting our reading instruction by doing lessons on all of the reading strategies that good readers use to aid comprehension of material. We will discuss, model, and practice predicting, inferring, visualizing, monitoring/clarifying, and decoding (phonics). The students will make notecards of these strategies to be kept in their reading folder as a reference all year long. We will work on more strategies the following week. We will also discuss "good fit" books next week. I do not give a lot of homework, but the homework I do give is either pretty important, or is few in amount. I do not like "busy work".
Math
We met today for the first time and read the book Math Curse. As a fun assignment I sent them home with a math house to get them thinking about math and the world around them. To modify this: if you have trouble coming up with math problems for different rooms in your house, feel free to just list math concepts that the kids see throughout the weekend. ex: money when they bought something at a store, time when they looked st a clock, measurements when cooking, etc. Even if this is not completed - no biggie. I don't grade homework. It's just for a discussion about math and our world on Tuesday. Next week we start chapter 1 in math on place value. Throughout the week, we will be using the reteach worksheets in the chapter 1 packet and hopefully completing them in class. If they do not finish, I will ask them to complete one or two problems for homework practice. It is definitely not a major assignment. These sheets are used as a study packet for chapter tests. Also on the top is a mini lesson on the subject for parents or for reteaching purposes. It is a great resource!
Writing
I encourage all of my families to start a weekly (or daily if you can) journal for/with their students. It is a great way for them to reflect on the day/week and/or share their feelings. The student can write a bit before bed and you can edit it for them or respond to any questions they may ask you. They can also write a dream journal and record their dreams right when they wake up. Or if you want... they can respond to a prompt that you give them or they come up with themselves. I will send home with each student next week a list of journal prompts to get them started. If your schedule is chaotic - this is great to do anytime you can. Encourage your student to make their responses into paragraphs and think of 6 sentences to support your topic sentence. They could even make them into a creative story! ANY writing practice is great practice!
Tune in next Friday for more Forsman Fun!