Happy New Year!

I hope you all have had a wonderful break with your families! I am looking forward to a fantastic start to 2013 with your children. It's hard to believe we are approaching the halfway mark of this school year!

With the upcoming week being only 3 days we have many things to accomplish. We will complete our non-fiction reading unit by looking at how the table of contents, the index, and the glossary are all important features in a non-fiction book and how to utilize them appropriately.

We will begin a non-fiction writing unit and use all that we learned during our reading unit to help us as we write non-fiction. We will have to choose topics that we feel we are "experts" on to teach our readers something about our topics.

Our focus this week during word work will be understanding the subject and predicate of a sentence. All of us have been focusing on our sentence structure being sure to incorporate the basic mechanics consistently so we now will be moving towards writing more complex sentences.

In math, we'll continue to practice our multiplication facts as well as learn about the factor of 4. You will be seeing more word problems as these continue to be a challenge for most and we need to practice these types of problems.

We will be wrapping up our study of Egypt by looking at pyramids and King Tut. This has been an exciting unit!

It is January, and for the third grade this is an exciting time! Our portable planetarium Star Lab will be visiting us for 3 weeks! This week we'll go in to learn about the fall/winter constellations that we can see in the night sky during this month. We'll learn how to locate them using a star map and will learn about the horizon line and the zenith. 

Please be on the look out for more information coming home with your child this week about the third grade night at Elsmere on January 16th. I hope to see all of you there!