Weekly Work

End of Year

**Math**

We are doing odd and ends in Math now that the EOG's are over.  I am making the children focus on "long division" this week in preparation for third grade.  It's been a little struggle to grasp, but as a whole they are doing really well. 

Last week we create and had a Math Carnival where the students developed their own Math games, carnival style, and set it up.  We invited a class from both the 2nd and 4th grade to come play.  We also had time to play ourselves in the other 3rd grade classes!

**Reading**

We have spent the last week or so reading "novels".  Each child had a novel to read, different genres, and then picked a Reading Book Project of choice to create/complete.  We will be presenting these to the class this week.

We are continuing to review all aspects of the skills/strategies we have worked on during the year.  We are focusing on 4 main reading strategies:

1)  Prior/Background Knowledge:  While a student is reading, they are to take time to think about what they might already know about a subject/issue to help them  understand what they are reading about.

2) Context Clues:  When coming across a word a student doesn't know, they need to read the words/sentences before and after it to see what is being talked about to help them get the "gist" of what they word means.  They can also fall back on prior/background knowledge to help them understand difficult words.

3) Chunking the Text:  I am pushing this strategy big time!  Students are to read a paragraph or so and then stop and do a mini summary of what they have read so far.  It is helpful to jot down some notes beside the passage (like a road/story map) along the way.  By the end of the story, they should have a much better understanding of what they have just read and why they read it.

4) Reading the Questions without looking at the answers:  After reading the passage, students need to look at the questions (with the answers covered up) first.  They should attempt to see if they know the answer already or be able to find it before looking at their choices.  If they are able to do this, when they see an answer choice that is similar to their own answer if it clearer to them which answer to choose.

Writing

Narrative writing