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Upcoming Dates:

Wednesday, Dec 16–Advent Spiral–Please see administrative update for details. The children will have an opportunity to walk the winter spiral during school hours. Special Note: Girls should avoid wearing long skirts on Wednesday! I strongly encourage anyone who is free during the evening to come walk the spiral. It is a lovely, quieting and peaceful experience, very centering in the midst of our holiday parties and family preparations.  

Wednesday – 3rd Grade Library Visit — Have your child bring back the books they checked out to be returned or renewed.

Friday, Dec 18, 3:15 pm–Winter Break–School resumes Monday, January 4th.

Morning Lesson:

This past week, work continued to focus on the proper use of punctuation, identifying/creating the four types of sentences, and reviewing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. We also worked together on a creating a good topic sentence for our paragraph about the ten plagues. After condensing the the list of ten plagues into three sentences, we composed a sentence that both introduced the plagues and identified the time in which the plagues occurred. The use of time order words continues to be a part of our review of stories heard in class. The structure of paragraph was introduced with the help of the image of a hamburger. The topic sentence became the “top” bun and the details following were the lettuce, cheese and meat. To close we needed a sentence that served the same job as the topic sentence or also referred to as a bottom bun. Now don’t forget to take a bite and indent your paragraph!

We also spent some time identifying homophones.  These are words that have same sound but are spelled different. For example, “know” and “no”. I was amazed at how many they came up with.

On Friday, the children wrote letters to friends and family. Most letters are already in the mail. Some are still waiting for the recipients address. We will continue to practice our letter writing skills over the next few months with special attention to the layout and how to correctly read and write addresses.

Hanukkah:

A special thank you to Alison, Leigh, Natasha, Aviva, and Fabiola for helping the 3rd grade celebrate Hanukkah. The children had a fabulous time eating and celebrating Hanukkah with Rabbi Toby on Thursday. We ate latkes, heard a story, learned about the menorah of Solomon’s temple and had the opportunity to celebrate with some dancing.

Spelling Words:

They are a bit challenging this week. All except for 2 focus on the various ways the short vowel sound of /e/ is made.

  1. Bread
  2. Leaven
  3. Ahead
  4. Said
  5. Again
  6. Sled
  7. Fled
  8. Eleven
  9. Pharaoh
  10. Egypt

Math Facts:

Dec. 14th — 5 x 8, 4 x 4, 5 x 6, 25/ 5, 21/3

Dec. 16th — 5 x 4, 7 x 3, 3 x 6, 30/5, 16/4