Choose Love - Courage Unit

Kipling has adopted the school theme "Color Your World With Kindness" this year. In the spirit of helping students understand what kindness means and how to show kindness to others, the 3rd grade is using the Choose Love Enrichment Program to directly teach lessons on social emotional learning.

The Choose Love Formula is: Courage + Gratitude + Forgiveness + Compassion.

We are finishing up our first unit on Courage. It takes courage to be grateful, especially when things aren't going your way. It takes courage to forgive, especially when the person who hurt you isn't sorry and it takes courage to step outside your own busy life to help others.

The students have learned a few different strategies to help them be courageous:

• Brave Breaths
• Brave Pose
• Hug the Human
• CALM

Ask your child to show you their Brave Pose and how to take a Brave Breath when they are feeling anxious or worried.

If you'd like to learn more about the Choose Love Enrichment Program, click this link.

Reading Update

Unit 1: Building a Reading Life
In the first reading unit of the year, students have learned about themselves as readers. We started the year learning about how to set ourselves up for success as readers and how to track our reading to learn more about our habits. Then students learned ways to deepen our understanding of a story, such as:

• Giving ourselves a comprehension check as we read
• Predicting using what has happened so far, what we know about how stories go, and what we know about the characters
• Looking for clues that an author is asking us to envision or collect information
• Retelling the big parts of the story, skipping over the smaller parts

As we finish the unit, students are working on strategies to build our reading grit, particularly when they come to harder words in the text. Using context clues and knowledge of figurative language are two big tools we have begun practicing. 

Ask your student about his or her reading goals. How are they working to grow their grit as a reader? What will help them to build their reading lives? 

Math & Science Updates

Math:

Students have completed chapter 1 of their Big Ideas material and will be finishing Chapter 2 this week.  These chapters have taught students different strategies to solve multiplication equations, and they have also learned about the distributive property.  Please ask your child to demonstrate the distributive property, different multiplication strategies, and explain what patterns were found while looking at multiples of 2, 5, and 10.

Science:

Students have been learning about weather.  Please ask your child about the cloud types as well as the weather that comes along with the different kinds of clouds.

PJammin' Fundraiser

This Wednesday we are participating in a Pjammin' for Kids with Cancer event. Students can wear their pajamas to school on Wednesday with any size donation (a quarter, a dollar, etc.). All proceeds will go to providing free resources and support for kids with cancer and their families.

Writing Update

Writing

Students have been very busy in writing as they have been crafting true stories. Last week they chose their favorite story to work on for the rest of the unit to turn into a published book. Ask your child to tell you about the 3 different leads that they worked on today to start their story off with a bang.