PARENTS,
THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU DO TO PROMOTE YOUR CHILD'S SUCCESS AT SCHOOL! We are partners in your child's education. I look forward to meeting you!
Here are some ways you can help your child succeed in 3rd grade:
Volunteer at School: Did you know..... when parents are involved at school, student achievement scores soar? It's true. There are lots of ways to help. Sign up to help in the classroom or check out all the wonderful PTA activities and jump in with whatever interests you. Come and be a mystery reader or share a special talent that enriches classroom education. Help out with a party, art class, reading/math, chaperone a field trip or stop by to do some copying. This is all so helpful!
Absences: Students must be at school to learn. Please avoid extended vacations that require students to miss school. When students miss school for vacation, they are missing important lessons that build upon each other and these lessons cannot be made up in packets. Students who take vacation during school feel off-kilter and confused when they return and teachers must take valuable time away from the rest of the class to explain what was missed. School policy states that teachers may not provide missed work in advance of vacations. Please try to schedule doctor and dental appointments before or after school. If this is impossible (I understand- orthodontics!), please review the schedule and talk with Mrs. Duff about times that are less disruptive to learning. With that said please keep sick kids home and communicate with me (and the school office) about illness so absences are excused and work can be picked up at the end of each day. I really appreciate an email regarding any absence so that I can begin saving work for your child.
Stay-Tuned: Classroom updates are provided via email newsletters (you can request paper copies if needed). I will also send home progress reports or make phone calls if we feel that your child is not progressing as expected. Check the homework folder and backpack for graded assignments and important notes from the school.
Ask Questions: If you have any concerns or are wondering why something is happening, please feel free to call or email me at any time. I welcome all concerns, ideas, and feedback that affect your child or our classroom. If something is not working, let's figure it out together.
Homework: You should expect that your child will have some type of homework most every weekday. Usually this will include reading for 20 minutes per day, spelling practice, math pages and/or math fact practice. Please check the red homework folder for assignments. Homework is sent home on Friday so that families also have the weekend if weekday evenings are busy. Students need a quiet, designated location to complete homework. Homework routines and time management skills established now will benefit your child for the rest of their academic career.
Homework should be checked by parents. Please check homework for accuracy, neatness and completeness. This rarely takes more than a few minutes and gives parents info on what we are learning in school and whether or not your child is grasping the material. Learning to double check and edit work before turning it in for a grade is an important life skill.
Homework folders are due every Friday. I will contact you if your child is falling behind or turning in poor work. Please contact me at any time you are concerned about their progress.
Water Bottles: All students may bring a bottle of water to school everyday. Please do not send water bottles that have twist-off caps.
Birthdays: Please contact me a day ahead of time if your child is planning to bring a treat for his or her birthday. Store bought items only. Please consult with me on whether or not we have children with food allergies. Consider non-food items as well! A new pencil, erasers, or other trinkets are just as great and perfectly healthy!
Dress for Success:
Please make sure your student is wearing appropriate clothing and footwear for outside recess and PE in all types of weather throughout the year. All 3rd graders should be able to tie shoes, zip coats and put on boots and mittens independently.
Fuel up for Success:
A good breakfast fuels the brain and body for a long day of learning. A healthy breakfast prepares us to attack those
lessons with vigor. Consult with your child on the hot lunch menu. Will they eat it? We see a lot of food get thrown away at school and then children are low on energy and unable to focus and learn during afternoon lessons. Create a food plan that works for you and your child.
Exercise for Success:
Kids need to move it, move it! A fit body equals a fit mind. Exercise improves attention and learning at school. Make sure your child is getting 60 minutes of play or exercise per day.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Duff
Read on for some great parent articles.
Click on the green button for a Utah PTA flyer that explains the core skills students are learning in 3rd grade.
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January 2018
Why Families Benefit From Limited Screen Time
By Robyn Des Roches
"Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you."
--Robert Fulgham
Most of us feel some concern about our children's fixation on technology and the amount of time they spend on electronic devices. We fret over the elementary school child with his video game habit and shake our heads over the tween or teen immersed in her smartphone.
What few of us realize (or perhaps do not want to admit) is the connection between our children's worrisome media habits and our use of electronics that we are modeling for them. A study published last year by Common Sense Media documented an average of nearly eight hours a day spent on personal screens for watching television, social networking and playing video games - not by children, but by their parents. Even more surprising, out of the survey group of 1,700 parents of children ages 8 to 18, 78 percent believed they were modeling healthy media and technology use for their kids.
Tuning into devices and tuning out kids
We witness scenes every day that were inconceivable a mere 15 years ago. Parents scrolling through messages on the walk to school, eyes glued to screens at the playground, texting at restaurants and checking email while their children clamor for attention. What impact has this sudden change in parental behavior had on children? Clinical psychologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle reports on children's frustration and anxiety when they cannot make eye contact with their parents or fully engage their attention. Our constant connection to technology has created a new mode of sibling rivalry in which children compete with electronic devices for their parents' attention, rather than with a sister or brother.
Children can tell when we are with them physically, but mentally elsewhere. An instinctive need to remind parents of their existence prompts kids to interrupt as soon as we bend over our phones or focus on our laptops. When we stop what we are doing and fully concentrate, it can take only a few moments to fill an emotional need that would remain unsatisfied after hours of distracted half-listening while multi-tasking. Concentrated looking and listening also allows us to pick up on subtle clues of facial expression, body language and tone of voice that reveal the emotions behind our children's words and help us truly understand them.
Electronics and young kids
When I started teaching parenting classes a decade ago, I often heard complaints about the difficulty of prying preschool-age children away from their favorite television shows. Now, the complaints have shifted to the insatiable appetite for smartphones and tablets among 3- and 4-year-olds. A study released in October by Common Sense Media confirms a rapidly accelerating use of mobile electronic devices by young children. In just six years, the average amount of time children ages 0 to 8 spent on portable devices exploded from 5 minutes a day in 2011 to 48 minutes in 2017. As I hear in my classes, this dramatic increase in electronics use has affected behavior, with tantrums, power struggles and arguments often erupting over access to smartphones, tablets and other screens. Researchers at Boston Medical Center have also found that parents absorbed in their devices tend to react to their kids' requests for attention with undue harshness.
Beware the electronic pacifier
Young children often fidget and fuss while waiting. They often get in our way while we are trying to accomplish tasks. These behaviors are not new. What is new is the common parental response of handing over a phone or tablet to keep the peace. We rationalize that it is the easiest way to buy time at the restaurant or get through our list at the supermarket, but this short-term fix comes with long-term consequences. Among other things, it forms the association in kids' minds that whenever they are bored, frustrated or craving human interaction, they will be placated with an electronic pacifier. Reliance on electronics as an instant fix robs children of opportunities to build up patience, frustration tolerance and the ability to distract and amuse themselves.
Generations of parents accomplished their daily tasks without the aid of personal screens, and we can, too. With practice, it can become second-nature to distract, amuse and involve children when they are bored, fussy or underfoot. These strategies require more patience and thought than simply handing over a device, but they have the advantage of generating many long-term benefits, rather than interfering with the parent-to-child bond and generating bad habits that will prove difficult to break later on.
Creating limits you can live with
Most of us can remember a time when media had built-in, non-negotiable limits. Movies, music and information could only be accessed at specific times and in specific places. Children growing up today have never known anything other than an on-demand, 24-7 media-saturated world in which the only limits are those we impose on ourselves. Parents must provide guidance in setting and upholding reasonable boundaries. As with all limits, those on technology will be most effective when every member of the family takes part in planning them, and making sure they apply fairly to all. Parents can lead the way by modeling the behavior they want to see in their kids.
No electronics in bedrooms is a sensible place to start, as it will improve sleep hygiene for adults as well as children. Some families create an electronics box in which they park all the family's devices an hour or two before lights-out. Instead of bringing phones or tablets to the dinner table, try one of the commercially available conversation-starters, such as Table Topics, or some of the suggestions for mealtime fun offered by the familydinnerproject.org. Make a habit of having an electronics-free "special time" - 15-20 minutes spent one-on-one with each of your children, engaged in an activity of their choosing and focused entirely on them. Do what you can to create a clear separation between work time and family time. Setting aside a specific period of the evening to check for messages will provide an opportunity to disconnect, relax and fully engage with the people who most deserve (and will most benefit from) your time and attention.
Robyn Des Roches is a certified parent educator with the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP) and a leader of PEP's "Parenting Preschoolers" classes. PEP offers classes and workshops to parents of children ages 2 ½ to 18. pepparent.org
A great article from NPR
LEARNING & TECH
What's Going On In Your Child's Brain When You Read Them A Story?
May 24, 20186:05 AM ET
ANYA KAMENETZ
These days parents, caregivers and teachers have lots of options when it comes to fulfilling that request. You can read a picture book, put on a cartoon, play an audiobook, or even ask Alexa.
A newly published study gives some insight into what may be happening inside young children's brains in each of those situations. And, says lead author Dr. John Hutton, there is an apparent "Goldilocks effect" — some kinds of storytelling may be "too cold" for children, while others are "too hot." And, of course, some are "just right."
Hutton is a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital with a special interest in "emergent literacy" — the process of learning to read.
For the study, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with stories in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. All three versions came from the Web site of Canadian author Robert Munsch.
While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks.
"We went into it with an idea in mind of what brain networks were likely to be influenced by the story," Hutton explains. One was language. One was visual perception. The third is called visual imagery. The fourth was the default mode network, which Hutton calls, "the seat of the soul, internal reflection — how something matters to you."
The default mode network includes regions of the brain that appear more active when someone is not actively concentrating on a designated mental task involving the outside world.
In terms of Hutton's "Goldilocks effect," here's what the researchers found:
In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. "There was more evidence the children were straining to understand."
In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks. "The language network was working to keep up with the story," says Hutton. "Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means." The children's comprehension of the story was the worst in this condition.
The illustration condition was what Hutton called "just right".
When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children's understanding of the story was "scaffolded" by having the images as clues.
"Give them a picture and they have a cookie to work with," he explains. "With animation it's all dumped on them all at once and they don't have to do any of the work."
Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between — and among — all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language.
"For 3- to 5-year-olds, the imagery and default mode networks mature late, and take practice to integrate with the rest of the brain," Hutton explains. "With animation you may be missing an opportunity to develop them."
When we read to our children, they are doing more work than meets the eye. "It's that muscle they're developing bringing the images to life in their minds."
Hutton's concern is that in the longer term, "kids who are exposed to too much animation are going to be at risk for developing not enough integration."
Overwhelmed by the demands of processing language, without enough practice, they may also be less skilled at forming mental pictures based on what they read, much less reflecting on the content of a story. This is the stereotype of a "reluctant reader" whose brain is not well-versed in getting the most out of a book.
One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn't actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad's lap.
The emotional bonding and physical closeness, Hutton says, were missing. So were the exchanges known as "dialogic reading," where caregivers point out specific words or prompt children to "show me the cat?" in a picture. "That's a whole other layer," of building reading Hutton says.
In an ideal world, you would always be there to read to your child. The results of this small, preliminary study also suggest that, when parents do turn to electronic devices for young children, they should gravitate toward the most stripped-down version of a narrated, illustrated ebook, as opposed to either audio-only or animation.