This webpage will change periodically and give you calendar and curricular information, as well as links to websites that might be useful for your child to investigate. Newsletters will also be sent home giving you news and more information from the classroom. Check out our Upcoming Events column at left for dates to put on your calendar.
January 2012
As part of our JFS Tenth Anniversary celebration, B-11 students made a sticker for the Time Capsule, which you see above. If you look closely, you’ll see all the biomes we studied, the yummy bread we baked, Ms. Roman reading to students, our “stay healthy and avoid smoking” campaign, and various books and writing assignments, as well as, of course, our own Jimmy Jaguar school mascot! We loved meeting Mr. Smith, forty-year Evergreen superintendent, and Mr. Ector, the first JFS principal, as well as showing our school spirit for all the distinguished guests at the assembly on November 19th.
Parent conferences were, as always, a pleasure for me, getting to know more about each student and how I can help them to be more successful. It was delightful to meet all our B-11 families.
I hope you’ve all had a satisfying winter break, and children have played and relaxed and renewed their energy. Now that the holidays are over, we’re ready to settle down and get to work again!
Curriculum
In Language Arts, students will continue to improve in reading by reading independently, with me in small groups, with partners, and whole class, both as shared reading and enjoying higher level reading material in readalouds. We read fiction but are also studying nonfiction, and discussing or notetaking to help with understanding difficult subjects. In our Reading series, we continue through Unit 3 with several nonfiction readings and then move into an Amazing Animals theme, including revisiting our beloved Wilbur and Fern in a chapter from Charlotte’s Web. We will finish sharing the complete novel by E.B. White in our after-lunch readaloud time in the new year. Writing is becoming a real pleasure for this group of third graders, who eagerly await the return of the laptop cart to continue writing pieces, and we have an active Writers’ Workshop session going on most days. We are loving being penpals with Ms. Flores’ fifth graders, and several letters have gone back and forth through the halls already. Writing summaries of articles and paragraphs will be a real push this spring, and of course there will be many other writing opportunities within the areas of Science and Social Studies.
Social Studies will revolve around the theme of Santa Clara Valley history, moving along the timeline posted in our room from the thousands of years of peaceful Ohlone existence, with a quick project on explorer Portola discovering the area, the missions and ranchos era, and the early settlers who came from the east and China to forge a life here. The photo above shows our valley in the late 1800’s, the Victorian era, in a landscape painting from the Fallon House, the site of our next field trip. We will spend a few weeks learning about that particular time in San Jose’s history in preparation for our trip.
Science will focus on the physical sciences as we move closer to spring and the Science Fair. We will learn about energy sources, atoms, and light. Our science book will be a resource as well as experiments and demonstrations to learn these difficult concepts.
In Mathematics we have moved beyond learning multiplication and division facts and are finishing our unit on fractions and decimals before moving into geometry and measurement before the next benchmark test in February. Whew! It’s a fast pace, so thank you for helping your student keep up with good practice at home.
The Arts are always a pleasure, and we did plenty of singing and creating for the enjoyment of not only ourselves but others as well in the winter. We carolled through the halls on the last day of school, and made two complex stitching projects. Posters for the annual Food Drive were made in small groups, and illustrations for our Santa Clara Valley timeline are also being completed by groups of students. As part of the Under the Tuscan Moon auction event, all students have participated in the design of an art piece to be auctioned off in February. It was especially fun because our fifth grade penpals also worked on the same piece. We hope you will come and see it on auction night. Arts Attack continues every month in the capable hands of Mrs. Johal, and we appreciate every opportunity we get to do more artwork!
In P.E. kids are getting stronger and faster and more able to manage our two-lap regimen on the track each day. Soon we will add a third lap, so encourage good exercise on the weekends too to keep up their great physical stamina.
Thank you for visiting our webpage. Email me at hroman@eesd.org with comments or questions.
HELPFUL WEBSITES
AAA Know Math Third Grade.webloc
Dance Mat Typing - an onlin.textClipping
Scholastic site for kids - reading games and more!
Houghton Mifflin Education Place
**Be sure to check out other teachers’ webpages, especially Fourth Grade, Mrs. Whyte, at eesd.org/jfs for more links to good curriculum review!
Click on the link to view.
