Dear Parents,

It seems like only weeks ago when we were saying, "Welcome to Third Grade." Our "angels" have now grown in wisdom and grace and are almost ready to fly. For their teachers, May is a bittersweet time. We will miss them. In this newsletter will be a summary of some of our activities.

We are completing our study of the Apostles’ Creed, the prayer that states what we believe as Catholics. We are also working on a mini-unit about Heroes. The objective of this short unit is to look at the important persons in our lives. These persons are true heroes, rather than movie stars and major league athletes that the media hypes as heroes.

The children just learned about how our country began with the original 13 colonies. We are now learning about inventors.

We have completed our unit on Matter. The kids did a great job! Now we are working on Unit E, our study of six simple machines. We will go to the Cincinnati Museum Center on May 22, for some hands-on science.

Some students are studying a unit entitled "Forces of Nature". They are learning different forms of precipitation as they study weather, keeping daily weather reports, and learning the difference between a forecast and the official weather for the day. Other forces of nature such as tornadoes, volcanoes, earthquakes, and thunderstorms are included in this unit. Some students are creating brochures about tornadoes in Computer class. Other students read several fairy tales and then wrote their own fairy tales. We have also read several stories related to an Earth Day theme.

The week of April 14-18, we celebrated Spirit Week, with activities organized by Student Council. Each day had a different theme. Our kids had fun wearing slippers on Wednesday, for "Wear-a-Pair – Share-a-Pair Day". It was awesome to see the many pairs of donated slippers taken up in procession before Mass began! The slippers were taken to the Women’s Crisis Center and the Ronald McDonald House where they were greatly appreciated. The Third Grade Class earned an extra recess for showing the greatest spirit during this fun week.

On May 29, our students will do many fun activities requiring teamwork on Third Grade Olympic Day. All are looking forward to this fun day.

Thanks again for being such great parents to work with this year!