Check it out Week 8

Dear Parents,

This year, we will be using SpellingCity.com in our classroom. SpellingCity is a website that helps students learn their weekly spelling words while having fun at the same time. As a teacher, I will put up my weekly spelling lists on SpellingCity and your children can review the words, and play spelling games with their words to reinforce the learning process. Here’s how to help your child master his or her spelling words: Simply go to http://www.spellingcity.com/MrFisher/ to see how the site works.

To get started, click on “Week 8” Spelling List. Then try the Teach Me, Test Me, or Play A Game link. You can always find our class spelling lists by simply clicking on “Find a List” and typing in my name, Ronald Fisher. The lists will appear and your child can immediately start using it to practice his or her words. Many kids enjoy building their spelling skills with Spelling City. Please encourage your children to spend about twenty minutes, two nights in a row before their weekly test. The challenge is to do the "Test Me, Teach Me and Play a Game" links before Thursday.

Let’s work together as a team to ensure that your child becomes an independent, lifelong learner. I have also linked the icon on the side to go directly to our Spelling List.

Yours truly,

Mr. Fisher

Spelling Words will be posted tomorrow with some further details about the long e and how it is used this week (not weak).

Other things happening this week include:

1. Reading the play "The Strongest One" a story about Little Red Ant and his quest to find out who is the strongest one. Here is a link to find out more about Joseph Bruchac and the illustrator Lucia Angela Perez.

http://treasures.macmillanmh.com/utah/students/grade3/book1 This is the main link (I wanted you to see this main page - so you can always come back) and look under Unit 2 to find the story "The Strongest One."

a. Try the Spelling Activity

b. Try the Vocabulary Activity

c. Look up the information about the Author and the Illustrator

2. Finishing Rule Page 1 - This is part of their spelling notebooks. I will explain this later.

3. Daily Grams:

a. Capitalization: Capitalize the name of a school, college, hospital, medical center, special house, museum, or department store.

b. Punctuation: Apostrophe (Bob's dad), Commas after the closing of a letter (Truly yours,), After dates (Tuesday, October 20, 2009), and using the Exclamation Point (Yikes!).

c. Parts of Speech: Past Tense (A bird hops / hopped on the grass), Nouns (persons, places or things), Adverbs often tell how (how did she wash the car? slowly), and Adverbs tell where (Come here).

d. Prefixes/Roots/Suffixes (dis + honest, dump + ed), Compound Words (made up of two words), Sentence Types (statement tells you something, question asks you something, command tells you to do something), Difficult words (Two = 2, to = preposition or part of a verb [to draw], too = also or overly [too fast]), Dictionary Guide Words, and Synonyms (words that have similar meanings).

4. Announcement - sometime this week The Rotary Club will be presenting our third grade students with a dictionary to be used at school, and if you are like me I still have mine from my third grade teacher.

5. Math - Math Block Assessment - from the district this test is designed to help us as teachers know where your students are in relation to what we have taught them so far this year. It measures their growth, but more importantly it helps me know what they didn't get. We are also reviewing estimating, rounding, Properties of Addition, and moving on to Adding 2 and 3 digit numbers. My goal is to have them try to add in their head. :)

6. Science This Week: Tools of Science, Antarctica, Penguins, Archimedes, and some more information on the Moon (plus the start of our Moon Journal). I will post more information on this Tuesday or Wednesday. The Lab this week looks at making a compass - hope you are ready.

Well thank you again for coming in last week and meeting with me during Parent Teacher Conferences. I have the best class and they proved it on Thursday afternoon. I had to leave for the afternoon to celebrate my mother-in-law's retirement (http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=8328296). The students were respectful for the substitute Mrs. Stacey, and they worked hard for her. Thank your kids for me.

Thanks,

Mr. Ronald Fisher