Fall Conferences Coming Up

We  look forward to our dessert social this Thursday night. An email should have come home last week. The third grade parents are being asked to contribute desserts. We will meet and greet in the dining room from 6:30-7:15.  Hope to see you there.

This week we finished working on our Someday projects and started learning about different genres of books. The students will be encouraged to read books in several different genres throughout the year and we will set up challenges on Biblionasium to help them stay focused on that goal.

We also began to collect Words We Love. This is a year long activity that aims to expose students to new vocabulary words in a way that is fun and meaningful. Research shows that in order to add a new word to your vocabulary you must hear and use it at least 40 times! We collect words that we love during read aloud time as well as in our other subjects. This week we collected the words drab, wilted, tedious, and efficient. We post the words in the classroom and practice using them in a sentences that show the meaning. Then whenever someone hears someone else using the word correctly they say, "ding, ding" and a tally mark goes up on the Words We Love chart! You should have heard how many times efficient was thrown around during math yesterday!

In math we went on a measurement hunt around the room to practice measuring accurately in centimeters. The students also held a math forum where students shared their strategies and other mathematicians asked questions and clarifying comments about the strategies and thinking. We are beginning to move towards more efficient strategies for combining double and triple digit numbers as well as adding multiple numbers at a time. Some of these include combining numbers by place value and finding friendly numbers to "jump" to on a number line. Some students might be ready for the standard algorithm or "carrying" method, but what we usually find is that most make careless errors and when asked to explain their thinking they are not sure why the carrying happened. We want to make sure that they have a solid conceptual understanding before moving on to quick strategies.

We look forward to starting our new Weather and Climate unit next week as well as a punctuation study in literacy.

Our fall conferences are coming up and this is a great time to talk about academic and social goals for you students this year. You can sign up on the sidebar under 'Important Dates'. Please let me know if you have any trouble and we  can help you to navigate the wiki or put you in a time slot ourselves. We can  also can be available some mornings at 7:15 if that works better with your schedule.

If you would like to sign up to volunteer to do a Friday Workshop at some point. The sign up is under Important Dates also. This is a time to work with a small group on a craft, game, sport, or other activity. The workshops run from 2:00-2:40 most Fridays throughout the year.

Dreaming of Someday

This week the third graders were busy planning their hopes and dreams project. We read the book Someday by Eileen Spinelli and used the story and lovely artwork to begin thinking about our own dreams for what we will be "someday" and what things we can work on this year that will help us to achieve our dreams. We have future scientists, authors, and engineers who are all taking small steps towards their goals by working as teammates, reading books about topics that interest them, and developing their math problem solving skills. These projects will hang in our room as a reminder of our goals for the whole year.

We have also been busy with word study. Students have learned about the different types of sorts and last week they got together with their small groups to learn about their first list of words. They have been working together to sort their words and reflect on what they notice and how understanding patterns in words can help us as spellers and readers.

The Green Group collaborates on a writing sort to practice long a and short a words

In math we have been thinking about what it means to solve problems efficiently. The mathematicians have a variety of different strategies for solving addition and subtraction problems and now we are working on showing our thinking in a way that is clear. Finding the difference has been a focus this week and many of our work place games have provided the kids with  fun, interactive, hands-on practice to develop their strategies and fact fluency. Next week we will be focusing on measuring to the nearest centimeter accurately.

These mathematicians practice subtraction with Blast Off To Space workplace

We ended the week learning about insects during our first Four Winds lesson. The kids (and adults) took away a lot of new learning about insects anatomy, vision, diet, and how they do not like to be labeled as "bugs!" Thanks so much to our amazing volunteers. If you would like to join them let us know.

There was a mistake about our dessert social in the Bell last week. We will be having a dessert social on Thursday, October 2nd from 6:30-7:15pm. We invite you to join us in the courtyard (or dining room for a rain location) to enjoy dessert and get to know the families, students, and teachers that make up the Mosaic Team. We are asking for third grade parents to bring desserts to share. The fourth grade families will take care of other supplies. Please be mindful of allergies and provide a label for treats that may contain nuts. 
We hope to see you all there!

Happy Fall!

S.M.A.R.T. Students!

The year is off to a fantastic start already. We are happy to see that many of our Mosaic kiddos have already connected with old friends from ABS and we've already seen new connections start to happen. Much of the first six weeks of school is devoted to making these kinds of connections as we implement techniques from the Responsive Classroom curriculum and discuss and model what it looks like to be S.M.A.R.T. (Safe, Mindful, Accepting, Respectful, and Truthful) in our school.

We have been learning about each other, the new building, and the expectations that make up our learning community through interactive team building games and activities over the past few days. We have also started to make observations about how we learn math and will begin to review strategies for addition and subtraction next week. In literacy, we have been sharing our favorite books as a way to learn about who we are as readers. Living a literate life makes strong, thoughtful readers and writers!

Many of our read aloud selections have themes that are focused around being Safe, Mindful, Accepting, Respectful, and Truthful. Our students have been making connections between the characters and themselves as members of Mosaic and WCS.

We have received several questions around who to contact in the event of a schedule change for your child. If you have a change that you know about in advance please email Sally Dattilio at sdattilio@cssu.org and cc your child's teacher on the message. You can also send in a note and we will be sure that the change gets communicated.

If for some reason you need to make a last minute change please call Amy Benoit in the front office. She will communicate the change to us. Please do not leave a voicemail message on our phone extensions. We can't guarantee that we will listen to those before the end of the school day.

We will answer more questions about communication, homework, themes, and volunteer opportunities at our Curriculum Night on September 11th at 6:00. We hope that you will be able to join us. If you are not able to come, the presentation will be posted on the blog for you to access.