Welcome to 3rd Grade!

Written by: Ms. Emily Hanrahan (3rd Grade Teacher)

3rd grade is a big year for our students! We learn new concepts, like multiplication and division, while perfecting and practicing things that were learned in previous years, like reading skills and cursive. Though we put in a lot of work, we never fail to have fun while learning in our classroom! Scholars are engaged in their learning through hands-on activities and projects that connect to their interests. 

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Social/ Emotional 
MELA Tickets: In our class we follow our MELA expectations by being mindful, empathetic, leaders, and accountable. Throughout the day students in 3rd grade pass out MELA tickets to peers they see displaying these expectations. We also have conversations about our emotions and how to handle those emotions daily.

Mindfulness: Calm Connect, our mindfulness program, is a patented system used around the world that contains dozens of short digital sequences designed to calm the nervous system and build a bridge to the social world quickly and effectively.

Student of the Month and Most Improved: The Student of the Month and Most Improved students get to sit at a special table in the lunchroom to celebrate!

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Read to the Final Four Competition
​Read to the Final Four is a literacy challenge aimed at creating a lifelong love and interest in reading for students across Minnesota. The NCAA, Women’s Final Four, and the Minnesota Local Organizing Committee have teamed up to inspire and incentivize third graders across the state to develop their abilities and entice participation in this nine-week program. Schools and students can win fun prizes and compete for an overall grand prize of $5,000 of books for the school library. Our class is currently ranked 31st out of 101 schools and we won the first prize that was given out! Our class has also read over 10,000 minutes in 3 weeks! 

Literacy/Phonics
​During whole group literacy instruction, we teach important reading skills while also integrating science. Most recently we have been learning about severe weather! We continue our literacy work in our small reading groups. All students meet with the teacher 4 days a week to get more personalized reading instruction that caters to their reading level! We are also working on improving our cursive writing. We just finished reviewing all our lowercase and uppercase letters and will now move into writing cursive sentences.

Math
In math, we use Bridges Math Curriculum to help build a solid understanding of math skills while also learning multiple strategies to solve addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. We focus heavily on small group instruction for math as well. All students meet with the teacher 4 days a week to get more personalized math instruction that caters to their needs!

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