Third Grade News

If you have a change to make in how your student gets home or if your student is ill, please include Shelly Sartin (shelly.sartin@gcisd.net) and Charlotte Brumley (charlotte.brumley@gcisd.net) on the email. Due to our schedule, we don't have a lot of opportunities to check our email during the day and Shelly will make sure we get the message. We don't want to miss any important messages!

Our wonderful Morning Melodies Program is back! Mr Kaufmann started this program last year and it was featured on the evening news!

We have a fabulous old piano Mrs Kaufmann found that needed a new home so we fixed it up, got it painted and now students can play some fun tunes in the morning to welcome our Texans into the school as they enter the building! It is a very relaxed, positive space to try out a new tune or show off something you are learning in the piano lab!

If your student would like to sign up for a slot, please click the link below!

Morning Melodies

This week we started our Third Grade Typing Club. This is a program in our curriculum that provides lessons that help students practice the correct way to type on a keyboard. They will have opportunities to work on this in class and can also work on the lessons at home if you wish.

We just wanted to send a reminder that it is time to check for growth spurts after our wonderful summer apart. We know it is tricky

• Third Grade is a stress free zone! If something seems to go wrong, just let us know and we'll work through it with you!

• Students are welcome to bring in a non breakable sealing water bottle with water in it (please no soda or colored drinks) to drink from during the day in our classroom. Plastic or padded waterbottles are a huge help as the metal/glass ones make a lot of noise in the hallways when they fall.

• Recess is at 11:30 each day and lunch time is at 12:00.

• Students are welcome to bring a dry, nutritious snack to class each day. We will have a short, designated snack time in the morning to tide us over until lunch.

• Please check the schedule below to see when your student will have PE to make sure they have gym appropriate shoes for that day. They are also able to bring a pair to change into if they want to wear their fun shoes the rest of the day.

• We know that the headphones provided by the school supply pack are not as sturdy as they can be so you are welcome to send in a pair from home if you would prefer!

9/23 - STUDENT HOLIDAY - No School for Students (Professional Learning for Staff)

10/1 - SPIRIT NIGHT at Chicken & Pickle from 6-8 pm

In reading this week, we wrapped up our first module where we talked about what makes characters interesting! We made inferences about the characters and events in the story using our background knowledge and text clues. We also reviewed point of view and asked ourselves the theme of a story. Finally, we talked about the ways authors will use different kinds of text and graphic features to make important things stand out to us as the readers. To reinforce these things at home, ask your child if they can identify the theme and point of view of a story and have them use text evidence to prove it.

Writing: This week we were able to complete our final draft of a personal narrative. The students revised and edited their work with the help of classmates and the teacher. Once they were satisfied with their work and felt it met the requirements that our writing rubric asked of them ( we reviewed this rubric throughout the process) the students turned it in with a detailed illustration. Mrs. Flink and Mrs. Delfeld will be working on reading, enjoying, and grading these pieces next week so that we can send them home to you!

Social Studies: As we continue our unit on communities, we spent the week studying how communities change over time in so many ways. Physical changes can occur as communities develop, grow, or are affected by natural disasters. The way that communities function can change as new ideas are used to better improve technology. Leadership members can also influence communities in the way that they lead. This is all preparing us for our big walk to Colleyville City Hall on October 18th to see things for ourselves. Be looking for a permission slip in the coming weeks!

Because of Winn Dixie Book Club: We were able to begin our book club this week and we are already so invested in these characters. Opal is our main character, a little girl who lives with her father, a preacher, in a brand new small town with no friends. She surprises her dad when she comes back from the Winn Dixie grocery store with no food and one stray dog. With a little convincing, she is able to keep him and it isn't long before she realizes that he isn't ordinary in any way. Next week Opal will be meeting some people around town with a little help from Winn Dixie. Ask you child what Opal and Winn Dixie are up to each day!

Science this week was a whole lot of learning packed into a short week! Our focus this week was centered around our essential question: how do heating and cooling change matter? We discussed how matter changes between the 3 states, using our vocabulary terms like condensation and evaporation, to give names to those processes. Through our investigation our scientists explored the changing states and found that it is all dependent on temperature! The scientists also explored the states of matter on the molecular level! We did this through an Arts Integration movement activity in which the kids used their body to show what solids, liquids, and gases look like and act like as they experience heating and cooling while changing states! Check out some pictures of our scientists-turned-molecules below!

This week we are wrapping up our dive into Place Value. We will be taking our first TEKS Check next week to see how much we have learned and if we have any areas could use some review. We have been studying rounding to the 10s and 100s places, greatest to least, expanded form, standard form, estimation, and model form. We reviewed how numbers have value based on their place in our number system. We examined several different ways to express and show a number such as Standard Form, Word Form, Model Form with Base 10 Blocks, and Expanded Form. We practiced using all of these areas and composing and decomposing numbers up to 100,000! We also looked at ordering numbers and comparing them with greater than, less than, and equal to.

1.Students are able to bring in one small, dry, healthy snack to each during the morning. Water bottles that seal are welcome as well.

2. We will be getting our Chromebooks soon and trading in our iPads. Chargers will be coming home with the Chromebooks so you can make sure to have them charged each night.

3. Dismissal changes at the end of the day - If you need to change how your student is getting home and it is the day of, please call the office and Shelly Sartin will make sure we get the information. With all that goes on during the day, we don't have an afternoon break throughout the day to check email and we don't want to miss an important notice! Thank you!

Corrie Kaufmann corrie.kaufmann@gcisd.net

Jenna Flink jenna.flink@gcisd.net

Alex Diaz alex.diaz@gcisd.net

Megan Delfeld megan.delfeld@gcisd.net