Third Grade Newsletter- Week 1

10/12 Student Holiday

10/23 Spirit Dress Day/ Fall Family Fling

10/28 Class and Individual Picture Day

10/30 Halloween Party Day- NO early release

Dear Third Grade Families,

Parent Teacher Conferences are still on our minds! We truly appreciate the thoughtful feedback you shared, the positivity you brought, and your willingness to work and collaborate with us to support your child. It is such a gift to partner with you, and we are grateful for the strong home-school connection we share. Please continue to reach out whenever you have questions, concerns, or simply something you would like to share with us. We value your communication and are always happy to connect!

We also had such a faith-filled week celebrating Episcopal School Week! So many wonderful activities and events took place that reminded us of the joy, faithfulness, and sense of community that make St. Luke’s such a special place. It was a beautiful opportunity for our students to celebrate what it means to be part of our Episcopal school community and to see their faith woven into our everyday experiences.

With three short weeks in a row, we have certainly been busy and on the go in our classrooms! Despite the busy schedule, our third graders have been working very hard, staying focused, and continuing to meet our classroom expectations. We are so proud of the effort and perseverance they are showing each day.

Thank you, as always, for your continued help, encouragement, and support. We are so grateful to be on this journey with you and feel incredibly lucky to teach and learn alongside your children each day!

With gratitude,

The Third Grade Team

Math Focus:

Over the next few weeks, we will be diving into Chapter 4: Multiplication Tables in our Math in Focus curriculum! This chapter will focus on building strong multiplication fact fluency while helping students understand why multiplication works.

Students will be working on:

🔢 Multiplication Facts

• Learning and practicing the 6s, 7s, 8s, and 9s multiplication facts
• Extending their understanding to the 11s and 12s
• Using patterns, known facts, and strategies to help solve unknown facts
• Building accuracy and fluency with multiplication facts

✖️ Multiplication Strategies

• Using equal groups, arrays, and area models to represent multiplication
• Looking for patterns and relationships between multiplication facts
• Using known facts to find new facts (for example, using a known fact to help solve a harder one)

➗ Connecting Multiplication & Division

• Understanding that multiplication and division are inverse operations
• Using multiplication facts to solve division problems
• Writing related multiplication and division fact families
• Solving division problems using models and known multiplication facts

Find out more in the School-to-Home Connections!

ELAR Focus for Next Week:

• Reading: Third Grade Detectives-we will be finishing this book up this week (I thought we would last , but we ran out of time).

• • Identify important clues in the text.

  • Make predictions about what might happen next.

  • Make inferences about characters' actions and motivations.

  • Use text evidence to support answers to chapter questions

• Spelling

  • A new spelling list has been given out to students
  • If your child's list has been misplaced, the list of words is below
  • Next spelling test: Friday, October 23rd

• Writing: We will continue to work on our responses to questions. How do we restate the question and answer it using examples from the the text? Work on paragraph writing.

Science Focus:

Our Forces Around Us unit has come to an end, and now it is time for students to take all that they have learned about pushes, pulls, gravity and magnetism and bring their science to life through STEM.

The students Engineer and Design Challenge will be to design and create a maze using force and motion where they will move a car through the maze using the force of magnetism. Day 1 and 2 students will plan their design, then create an engineering team to design their maze together. Students will label their design that meets the specific criteria and constraints of the challenge.

I am excited to see what our St. Luke’s engineers design and create!

Academic Language We Are Using This Week

attract, repel, magnetism, criteria and constraints

Social Studies Focus:

Over the next few weeks, our 3rd graders will be exploring the physical environment and how it shapes the communities where people live! Students will learn about landforms, climate, natural resources, and natural hazards and how people adapt to and modify their environment.

We’ll also explore how human activities such as building homes, conserving resources, and pollution can impact the environment and the communities around us. Students will practice using social studies vocabulary, describing physical features, and thinking about ways people can responsibly interact with their environment. 🌱🏔️🌎

A huge Hilltop THANK YOU to our wonderful parent volunteers for serving as your grade-level Class Captains! Please be sure to join the 3rd Grade Group on the St. Luke’s App to stay connected and receive important updates and communication throughout the year.

Stacie Koonhow - stacie_harris@hotmail.com

Angie Shotzberger - angie.shotzberger@gmail.com