The Most Important Homework

As you know, your child has nightly homework to read at home. They have a reading log to fill out each night, that THEY can fill in with their book title and minutes read. Their job is to read a MINIMUM of 20 minutes a night. Research shows that children who read at least 20 minutes a night often perform on or above grade level in reading and language arts.

This can include:
- Reading to a parent, sibling, grandparent, relative, etc.
- Someone reading to them.
- Reading a book, magazine, newspaper, etc.

Tips:
- If you don't sit and read WITH them, have them read in a room where you can see that they are reading. Third graders still need to be monitored.
- Have them read out loud to you, or just out loud to themselves.
- Alternate reading out loud and silently. Good readers need to practice reading out loud as well.
- Break up the time into smaller chunks.
- Read more on nights that you have more time to make up for the nights that you are busy and reading time is cut short.
- Ask your child about what they read every few pages or chapter.
- Take turns reading to each other.
- Have them bring one of my books home that they are reading in school. That's perfectly fine with me.

I feel reading every night is so, so important. Third grade is a crucial grade where we really bump up the reading rigor. They are expected to read for longer amounts of time, and we really work on building stamina. They also need to read for a variety of purposes and a variety of text genres. Below are some visuals and links to articles on the importance of reading.

1. Reasons to Read to Your Elementary School Child

2. Why Read 20 Minutes a Day?

3. Practice Makes Perfect, Especially in Reading

4. 8 Ways Parents Discourage Their Kids From Reading

Happy Reading!

Realistic Fiction Writing

In Writing Workshop we are working on writing a Realistic Fiction story. We are following the Lucy Calkins unit of study. We are SO lucky because Mrs. Daniels, our school's literacy coach, is working on it with us! We get to have two teachers in the room! It has been so much fun already, we really enjoy thinking "what if" to create our fictional story. We've come up with a character, setting, and a problem that our character faces. We have planned out the sequence of events, visualized the setting, and will soon begin drafting. 

Prowler Pride Friday!

Last Friday Coach Loe brought these ladies in to talk about basketball.

This morning 3 captains from the boys basketball team visited us. 

One of the boys even showed us a card trick!

Sam & Destiney were "caught being good" and Mr. Wienen brought them some prizes!  Good job guys! 

Have a super weekend! :)

Winter Art Projects {Penguins & Reindeer}

We made a couple of awesome art projects lately. The first one is these adorable penguins! All you need is scissors, glue, and construction paper! We loved making them, I think they turned out perfect! I got the idea for these here.

I got the idea for these reindeer from an awesome blog I follow called, Run! Miss Nelson's Got the Camera! Click here to see her post. She also has a link to the Artventurous post where she got the idea from! We drew the reindeer with pencil and outlined with black oil pastel. Then we colored the nose and the scarf with a red oil pastel. The rest was watercolored! I think it would be just as easy and cute to use crayons instead of oil pastels as well! I can hardly even handle how cute they turned out!