LADUKE NEWSLETTER
November 10 -14, 2008

Dear Class Families,

Welcome to our new class member, Harsheen Marwah who comes to us from Memphis, Tennessee. I’m very proud of how all the children have helped her to feel at home.

Our Professional Day speaker on Friday, JoAnn Deak author of Girls Will Be Girls, was an amazing and extremely interesting one. I hope some of you were able to attend her talk on self-esteem on Thursday evening.

This is going to be a week filled with activities. Mainly, we will have our Poetry in the Park performance on Wednesday and the Book Fair taking place all week in the media center. The children will be allowed to go to purchase books each day, but Monday is our browsing day. No book purchases are made on that day.

Our monthly guidance lesson with Mrs. Lippincott is on Tuesday.
Tuesday is our monthly art appreciation class with Picture Lady.
Thursday we will watch a performance on “Gratitude” by Ms. Nelson’s middle school drama class.

Friday is the all-school pep rally on the high school football field.

SPELLING LIST
This week’s spelling is on more of the vowel diphthongs.

VOCABULARY LIST
The vocabulary words are taken from the next unit of our reading series. We should be finished reading the stories and ready for the vocabulary test by Friday.

MATH
We are continuing to apply multiplication concepts to real life situations and introducing the concept of division. I help to explain the concept of division by showing how cards are usually dealt in a game. Soon we will be asking the children to memorize the facts, but for now we are more concerned with mastering the basic patterns and concepts.

READING
We will be reading stories from Theme 2 of our reading series and focusing on the structure of a story. This is a very important concept since it aids in helping children to write stories with a beginning, middle and end. This organization of story writing will be invaluable when the children write their essays in spring for the ERB tests. More information about those tests will be coming later.

LANGUAGE
Subject/verb agreement in sentences will be introduced, and we will be reviewing prepositions.
There were no new blogs from last week since the children were typing and formatting the poems from last week.
http://w3.shorecrest.org/~thirdgrade/GR3/LADUKEPAGE/BlogOn.html

SCIENCE
We are learning about the various forms of matter – solid, liquid and gas. Last week in science resource, the children made lava lamps (remember those?) that included all three forms of matter.

SOCIAL STUDIES
Our study of native American Indians of Florida continues. We will review the Timucua, compare them with the Calusa, and introduce the Tequesta of Biscayne Bay.

Finally, I am attaching a copy of the poems we are memorizing for Poetry in the Park. The children should also have brought home a copy.

So much to do, so little time. Have a great week!

Donna LaDuke
dlad@shorecrest.org

http://w3.shorecrest.org/%7Ethirdgrade/GR3/LADUKEPAGE/webpage.html