Hello Families!
We are writing this evening to let you know of some very exciting events that we have coming up this week. We are celebrating Red Ribbon week every day with Spirit Week. Each day is an opportunity to dress a little out of the ordinary to bring awareness to saying no to drugs and bullying. Here are the themes for each day: Monday: wear your clothes backwards Tuesday: wild hair Wednesday: wear a hat Thursday: team sports Friday: pajamas Additionally, this Wednesday from 10:00-10:40 is our monthly awards ceremony. Families of students receiving an award have been notified by us already. Friday is our monthly birthday celebration. All students who celebrated their birthday during the month of October can bring in a store bought treat to share with each classmate. Please plan to bring treats for 25-30 depending on your classroom. We will celebrate beginning at 3:30 on Friday afternoon. Next week is Halloween. We will celebrate with a parade beginning at 2:30pm. Students are welcome to bring their costumes to school to change into at the end of the day. Please make sure to send items that students can dress themselves with, over their regular clothing. Remember, only non-scary costumes are to be worn at school and no weapons or blood. Please know that more details about the parade and party will be communicated this week. Please let us know if you have any questions! Jessica, Jessica, Jocelyn Good Evening,
We hope you have had a wonderful weekend! Go Broncos! A few quick updates for the upcoming week: 1. Pictures are on Tuesday; you should have received the order form in Friday folders. If you did not receive your order form or need a new one please let me know ASAP and I will send one home Monday. 2. Book orders are due this week on September 22nd. You can send in the paper order form along with cash or a check made out to Scholastic or you can order online; click on parents and enter Mrs. Van Thorre's class code: Q274Y OR Mrs. Joslin's class code: QNHQ7 3. We are still working on a volunteer schedule; thank you to those who returned the form! 4. Please be sure Friday folders are returned every Monday and green behavior folders are returned each day. If your student ended the day on orange or red a signature is required. 5. Grandparents breakfast is September 29th the invitation/return form went home this past Friday in the purple folder. 6. Homework: there has been no homework thus far for literacy or math outside of work that has not been completed during the day. Our only request for homework at this point is to have your student read a minimum of 20 minutes every night and practice math facts! Mrs. Joslin and myself will discuss homework more at Back to School Night on October 4th. 7. Please mark your calendars for parent/teacher conferences coming up the evening of October 11th and all day October 12th. We will be emailing information home soon on how to sign up for a time slot that best fits your schedule. Thank you for sharing your children with us each day, it really is our privilege to be their teachers. As always if you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by email, phone, or text via Remind. Thank you, Jessica and Jessica Good Evening, Wow! Parents you have some pretty awesome kiddos! We are so excited to be their 3rd grade teachers this year it's going to be a wonderful year! You will find the newsletter attached below, in the Friday folder (purple folder this year), and on our website it will update you on our academic work. Please remember to sign up for Remind by texting 81010 and the message is @winona3 for Mrs. Van Thorre and @winona3b for Mrs. Joslin. A couple of housekeeping items:
Have a fantastic 4 day weekend! Jessica and Jessica Good Afternoon,
I cannot believe this is the last email communication of the year! As I reflect on my first year of teaching I am humbled and grateful that I was able to have your students for my first year! They made me laugh and grow every single day! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing them with me this year it was a privilege to be a part of their journey in life! They should have brought home a manila envelope that contained several things…
I have updated the website with all of the photos from this year! They will remain up until the first week of August. If you would like to save them to your computer follow these directions.
I will miss your kiddos terribly over the summer but look forward to seeing them in August! I hope you all have a fun and safe summer break! Jessica Van Thorre This is the letter I sent home in case it did not make it home… Dear Parents, Thank you for sharing your sweet children with me this year! I have really enjoyed my time with them and all of their giggles and tears! Watching them grow into 4th graders has been a pleasure! I can’t wait to see them in August and hear all about their summers! In this envelope you will find their latest iReady scores for math and reading. You will also find a summer packet of work! This packet is a review of 3rd grade standards and the hope is to reduce summer slide. As a special incentive the students who complete the packet, make corrections, and return it with a parent signature the first two days of school will receive a small gift card to go get an ice cream. In addition to the summer packet here is a list of technology apps and websites students can use this summer to help reduce summer slide. https://www.zearn.org (tablet friendly too) https://login.i-ready.com (computer only and available until June 30th) https://student.frontrowed.com/#login (also an app Front Row) https://www.getepic.com/sign-in-student (also an app EPIC! classroom code is URN-8280) https://www.kidsa-z.com (also an app Reading A-Z) Door 24 Plus (app only) Please email or text me at any time over the summer if you have trouble logging in to any website listed above. Have a fantastic safe summer!! Jessica Van Thorre [email protected] Good Afternoon,
WOW! Time is flying and we are down to 8½ short days of school. Thank you to everyone who brought their 3rd grader last night to show off their musical talents and see their amazing artistic talents! It was wonderful to see and hear! A couple of reminders:
Academics: This week I hope your students have come home so excited about what we are doing in class! I hope they have not given you the famous “oh nothing” comment because I and Mrs. Anderson have switched up the classroom and your students are learning, creating, discussing, and persevering through some literacy and STEM challenges! We started a unit on fairy tales and are dissecting them apart! Each morning we are reading 4-5 versions of a fairy tale and completing a group poster to show understanding of the fairy tale and how it compares to the others. Then in the afternoon we introduce a STEM challenge connected to the fairy tale. There has been some amazing perseverance throughout the week! Students tried to build a 6cm home for the three pigs using only toothpicks! Then we measured the one successful home to see if it would withstand the “big bad wolf” (aka a desk fan) and it did! Students also had to build a bridge to hold at least 26 pennies using only an index card. Pretty awesome stuff happening in the classroom! We finished this week with rewriting The Three Little Pigs as a class which is titled The Real Story of Trolls, ask your student about being an author and illustrator! Thank you for sharing your children with me throughout this year! They are special little people that I just adore! P.S. I will upload a ton of photos to my website this weekend from our science day, CSU basketball game, and this past week! Have a great weekend, Jessica Van Thorre Good Afternoon,
We had a short fast week! We ended the week recognizing 8 students in each class who have exhibited excellence in math, reading, growth mindset, and citizenship. Congratulations to the students who received an award in my classroom! A couple of reminders:
Flood Hour: Flood math and reading time is focused on skills specific to your student. This week we used flood time and part of math time to take iReady Math progress monitoring. Your student should be able to tell you how they scored in comparison to their MOY test in December. We will be taking iReady reading this coming week. If you do not sign up for a conference I will send home results on March 9th otherwise, I will provide you results at your conference time. Math: We are moving through unit 5 learning to use our strategies when solving word problems. 1. Re-read the problem 2. Underline important information 3. Draw a picture or write an equation 4. Do we have a total? If yes, it is a subtraction or division problem; if no, it is an addition or multiplication problem. Literacy: We wrapped up unit 4 week 1 which was extended out from the prior week. Our focus was on identifying the author’s point of view and locating text evidence to support our finding. Writing: In writing we learned to use a graphic organizer to organize our ideas from two passages with a goal of creating a well written paragraph response to the final question on their weekly assessment. Content Literacy: We are wrapping up our solar system unit this coming week and will be moving into a social studies unit titled Where in the World? toward the end of the week. As always please feel free to reach out if you have questions or concerns. Email works best but if you need to chat by phone or schedule a conference please let me know! Have a terrific evening! Jessica Van Thorre Good Evening,
You have some pretty amazing kiddos! I love coming to work each and every day to their smiling faces and just love that they are excited to learn! Thank you for sharing them with me and allowing me to be a part of their journey! A couple of reminders:
Flood Hour: Flood math and reading time is focused on skills specific to your student. We alternate daily between the focus being on math or reading. During math this past week we really focused on the math standard measuring time, volume, and mass. The class as a whole was not showing mastery of this 3rd grade standard. Ways you can help: have students figure out how many hours you ran errands, or how long they spent in the car, point out volume measurements and mass of products while shopping. In reading we focused on similes, metaphors, and our idiom of the week: The Early Bird gets the Worm! Have your student explain what that means! Math: We took our 3rd quick quiz for unit 4 on Wednesday and the unit assessment on Friday. We will graph our results and make corrections on Monday. As we move into unit 5 we will be focusing on solving one and two step word problems using all of the operations and strategies we’ve learned. Literacy: Week 6 of our Wonders curriculum is always a review week so this week we focused heavily on poetry. We learned about cinquain poems, rhyming verse, free verse, alliteration, similes, metaphors, lines, and stanzas. Your student should be able to explain each of those terms to you. We read 5 different poems and discussed each one in depth this week. We are moving along with our novel studies. Frindle and A Snow Day from the Black Lagoon groups will be finishing their novel this coming week and have a comprehension assessment. Bud, Not Buddy and Lemonade War groups have a couple more weeks of their novels but are enjoying their books immensely. Writing: Writing this week we wrapped up penguin research final copies. This coming week we will officially begin planet research and focus heavily on improving our written response to text. We will also be taking the MOY district writing prompt assessment to measure growth from the beginning of the year. Content Literacy: We have completed our study of the planets and moved into other parts of the solar system. We learned about meteoroids, asteroids, and comets. We will move onto Earth’s moon this week with a fun lab using Oreos to learn the phases of the moon and begin discussing how seasons are created. As always please feel free to reach out if you have questions or concerns. Email works best but if you need to chat by phone or schedule a conference please let me know! Have a great rest of your weekend! Jessica Van Thorre Good Afternoon,
February is here…brrr it’s cold outside! We had a terrific week of learning and practicing growing our minds and hearts! A couple of reminders:
Flood Hour: Flood math and reading time is focused on skills specific to your student. We alternate daily between the focus being on math or reading. Your student should be able to tell you the skill their group is working to master in order to improve their iReady test scores. Math: We are moving through unit 4 and will finish it on February 11th. Students took quick quiz #2 to assess their skills for 3 digit addition this past week. Those will come home next week. We will have quick quiz #3 on February 8th and unit assessment on the 10th. During this unit we are working on rounding to the nearest ten, hundred, and thousand. We are targeting addition and subtraction with 3 digits and finding different ways to solve the problem using grouping. Literacy: We are moving right along in literacy. We focus weekly on standards: this past week we focused on the standard of being able to sequence a non-fiction text. Your students are reading a lot of material during the week. As it comes home it would be great practice to keep it for rereading which increases fluency and comprehension. We started novel literature circles this week, we will meet every Friday to discuss their weekly reading assignment and job. Depending on your child’s group they are reading either Bud, Not Buddy, Frindle, Lemonade War, A Snow Day from the Black Lagoon, or have a book baggie of books. Writing: I am so impressed with how hard your students are working on their research! We are wrapping up the editing stages and moving into final copy! By the end of next week we will have wrapped up penguin research and moved into planet research to accompany our solar system unit! Content Literacy: This week we learned about Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune! Next week we will move into Earth’s moon and studying it for a couple of days! As always please feel free to reach out if you have questions or concerns. Email works best but if you need to chat by phone or schedule a conference please let me know! Have a terrific weekend! Jessica Van Thorre |
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February 2020
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