Mrs. Reetz's Remarkable Students from Room 26!

Last Tuesday was our Winter Program.  The students worked very hard on learning their song, poem, and dance. Mariana, Owen, Jazmine, Chris, Jenica, and Tony all dance to the song Frosty Weather. All the third grade classes practiced on our stage in the cafeteria.  It will be so nice when our new MPR is completed and we will have a stage to use. Most of our class all lined up and ready to go onstage for the Winter Program. Thank you Room 26 families for bringing your student to our Winter Program! The students performed beautifully!

Research has shown that reading poetry improves student reading fluency.  Last year I began having my students read poems for 5 minutes a day and saw their fluency scores improve dramatically! Every Monday, students get a new poem for the week, selected for their reading level, and they practice it every day. When time allows, they perform it in front of the class. This upcoming week, we will keep the poems for a bit longer and perform them with a green screen camera on Wednesday. Many students are memorizing their poems! Ask your student if they can recite one of the poems we've worked on so far this year.

All our third grade classes have been working with mentor texts (or sentences) to help our students become better writers and communicators.  Students study a sentence carefully selected from our Anchor Texts.  They idenitfy the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on.  Then they "play" with the mentor text by manipulating it to make new sentences. Students then write their own imitation of the mentor text by using a frame. Students are giving a pre and post assessment to demonstrate what they have learned about their writing.

When your student turns in ALL their homework on time, their HOT ticket is signed by their teacher. Every 2-3 weeks we have a special event for the students with full HOT tickets.   This week we had our first HOT activity.  All the third grade students who had completed HOT tickets played Freeze/Unfreeze Tag! It's a great game where there are no winners and no losers.   We listened to music and took selfies too!  If your student didn't make it for this HOT activity, the great thing about our HOT tickets is that they are cumulative - your student doesn't have to start filling out their ticket all over again.  I collect the tickets as they are filled out and hold on to the full tickets until the next activity.  

This last week, all students took the AR STAR test that shows what book levels they should be working on to improve their comprehension. Our AR deadline is Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017 for the first trimester.  We will be sending a letter home this week so you can see your child's grade equivalency, their ZPD (or the book levels they need to read), and how many points they need to earn. Please let me know if you have any questions. 😊 

Our 3rd grade team of teachers are very very excited to have a new ELA series to explore this year. A team of Sanger Unified teachers selected this series as the best one for instructing our students and we are thrilled to have new stories to explore, new topics to write about, and new projects to work on. Lexis & Joshua at the stool table. Angelina & Riley at the stool table. Tony and Miguel reading at the standing table. Jazmine, Henry, Jenica, and Kyra at the floor pillow table. Elizabeth and Rebecca at the regular desk. Carlos, Chris, Isaiah, and Bee at the bouncing ball table. Isabella, Dakota, Mariana, Logan, and Audrina working at the lap desk learning spot. I hope your student is finding their favorite learning spot.  Sadly, we are still waiting for some of the furniture, but it should be here in a couple of weeks.  (fingers crossed are crossed)