Welcome back to school! This crazy weather is making it hard to know what time of year it really is! Hot and humid, cool and rainy, what’s next?

We’re off to a great start in the resource room in third and fifth grades. We are reviewing our routines and classroom expectations for our community of learners, and now we are ready to start working on our reading, writing, and math strategies!

In Reading Workshop, both grade levels are considering good reading habits and setting reading goals, things that will help them progress at a steady pace. I am assessing students individually to see what their current reading level is using the Teachers College Reading Assessments to check their accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. Depending on their reading consistency throughout the summer, some students may have dropped a level, or increased a reading level from June. The most important thing is that they are reading books that are at their “just-right” independent level, so that they can practice the reading strategies that they learn in class. They will be using a reading log to track their home reading. Please make sure this becomes a daily habit, so that I can see the pace of their reading while at home.

In Writing Workshop, we begin the year learning the routines and discussing what it means to live a “writerly life” and use a Writer's Notebook.The first unit of the year is personal narrative writing, in which they choose one experience from their life and write about that time with details and description.

In Math, our third grade unit covers the use of various math tools, telling time to the nearest minute and calculating elapsed time, and the foundations of multiplication and division strategies. It’s very helpful if you are able to reinforce these concepts at home by having your child read an analog clock at different times throughout the day. So many of our clocks and watches are digital these days, however the skill is still an important one to have. It’s also crucial that the students maintain a fluency of basic math facts - addition and subtraction to start, and then multiplication will build off of those. Regular practice at home will support this fluency.

Fifth graders also continue to work on fact fluency with weekly quizzes, first with multiplication, then continuing to division. The first unit focuses on concepts such as place value and rounding.

Feel free to email me with any questions you may have about resource room. I look forward to meeting you at Back to School Night on Thursday, September 27 in Room 112A!