Welcome to Mr. McCabe's third grade classroom!

Thanksgiving is just around the corner! This month begins what is always a fun, and busy time in the classroom.

During the week of November 16th our class will be doing some reader's theatre pieces centered around the Thanksgiving theme. We will be making finger puppets, and doing a performance on the short Wednesday before the Thanksgiving break. The kids are already pretty excited. We have a lot of performers in here, so I look forward to next Wednesday being a fun, and entertaining day in the classroom.

When we all come back together after the break it will be time to get started on our Christmas Around the World unit. In this unit we will be looking at how this holiday is celebrated in 7 different countries around the world. We will be looking at holiday customs, sampling the seasonal treats, and making crafts from the countries we visit, and how their customs tie in to ours. Incidentally, the countries included are: Mexico, Italy, Sweden, France, England, Germany, and of course the U.S.  The kids learn to write checks to "pay" for airfare, fill out paperwork for passports, and learn some geography of the country we're visiting.

Currently in math we are working on difference problems. We are moving away from the term subtraction since most of what we are doing in class is taking subtraction problems and converting them into addition problems to find the difference between the two numbers. Please continue having your kids practice their addition and subtraction facts. Flash cards are the tried and true method, however, making tall-t's works too, or you can simply have your child write out a dozen mixed addition and subtraction problems on piece of paper and get through them in a minute or less.

Finally, I wouldn't be worth my salt as a teacher is I didn't put a plug in about at home reading. Please be sure to have your child spending at least 15 minutes a night reading. In addition, and I know how busy everyone is especially at this time of year, but if you can find an extra 10+ minutes a night to read aloud to your child, that would be awesome.

I want to thank those of you who were able to come in a meet with me during parent-teacher conferences. It was great to meet the parents behind such amazing kids.

~Cody