Mrs. Thorp’s Third Grade Blog

This is a question that many parents ask themselves everyday.

There is much debate on the subject and people will give good reasons for both sides.

When I was teaching full time, I had students who did well on  some form of medicine.  They were able to focus on their work and concentrate much better, which resulted in improved grades.

I also understand that parents don’t want to medicate their children unless really needed.  There are side effects:  not sleeping well and decreased appetite.

Here is one success story that I would like to share with you. Although I do not know the two people in this blog, I did know their mother and grandmother before she died.

I am not advocating putting all children on some kind of medicine for ADHD, but it does have some good success.  You as a parent need to do what you think is best for your child.

How can I help my child to be a better speller?  This is what many parents ask.

I recently found this web site that can help your child in a fun and varied way.  You can plug your child’s spelling words onto the site and it will teach the words, give games to play that will help your child learn the words and finally it will give your child a test on the words.  Very cool!

Check it out:  Spelling City.

I have several parents ask about how much writing they should expect their third grader to be doing in third grade.Third graders should be writing all the time.  Now this can take many forms throughout the day.  These are some of the things that I did when I was teaching:

• Journaling is one way.  In journaling a student writes thoughts on a certain subject that usually the teacher suggest.  Teachers may look at it and comment on it but do not correct any of the mistakes.
• Writing about Reading:  We did this very often.  Before we read a story we would write a paragraph on what we thought the story might be about.  After we read the story we wrote a summary of the story and then a paragraph where we would take an element in the story and compare it to our lives.
• In social studies we wrote in a scrapbook that told of our pretend trip we were taking across the United States.
• In science we wrote paragraphs that explained a certain process.

In all of the above areas we practiced writing a topic sentence that stated the main idea and followed it with facts and details that supported the main idea.

Once a quarter we would have a major writing project that would include writing more than one paragraph.  In these projects we followed the writing process of planning, writing, revising,editing and finally publishing the final copy in cursive with no mistakes (or hardly none).

Some of the projects were writing personal narratives, fairy tales, reports on a famous people, persuasive paragraphs and poetry.

There are lots of ways third graders can write during the day.  Some of it will be creative and will be not so creative.  Any ideas or questions?