August 26- 30

Wow!  What a hot week!  Sorry this was not updated until Friday...  I wanted to see what we accomplished during the week, since the heat provided some shortened days.

This week in Science, we worked in and out of the classroom on Unit 1, getting familiar with our ecosystem.  The students took a quiz on Thursday.  Keep an eye out for that.  Some may need to be completed again.

In Math, we continued number work.  Students worked to compare and order numbers.  We then solved word problems using the four-step process.  Students then reviewed for the test before testing on Thursday.  A word on math...  we complete all work per unit in our Math Notebooks.  It is a great resource to review for tests!

In Reading, we began reading Sarah, Plain an Tall.  With this book, we are introducing an important aspect of our Reading curriculum this year; Literature Circles.  These are small groups of  readers that are on the same reading level who all read the same book and respond to it to create a discussion.  There are specific "jobs" to complete that ask the students to look deeper about each part of the book.  To introduce this, students are completing the same reading, on the same book, and completing the same job.  The discussion is then whole class to demonstrate proper literature discussions.  So far, students have been introduced to the "jobs" of Creative Connector and Word Wizard.  Creative Connector connects to the book in some way.  Word Wizard takes unknown words from the story and asks students to become more familiar with them through specific tasks.  (I will post more on each job next week.)

This week in English Language Arts, we worked on editing sentences daily and discussing those skills.  We also are doing a brief review on handwriting- print and cursive.  In a world of technology, we sometimes forget that we still need to be able to present our work in a neat and legible way for others to read.  Students also need to be able to read other's writing, and that includes cursive sometimes!

A reminder assignments.  If a student scores in D or F range, they may redo the assignment. Please be on the lookout for these and encourage your child to redo these assignments, seeking help for better understanding if necessary.

I will try to post a "projected" look at our week rather than a look at what we have done.  It is a little difficult with not being at school, but I am trying!  I look forward to getting back.  

        

Welcome Back!

Welcome Back!!!

I hope that everyone had a nice, enjoyable, and relaxing summer vacation.  Mine was pretty busy, but I look forward to getting back this school year.

This week in class, we have organized our supplies, and settled in.  We began with actual school work on Thursday.  Here is a quick look at what went on.

In Reading, we introduced our new fourth grade readers to their notebooks.  This is something they will need to become very comfortable with, as they are a huge part of our curriculum this year.  Students discussed what they knew to be true about reading, and what keeps them reading.  You may talk about these topics with your child, helping encourage their own reading!  

In English Language Arts, we are also introducing notebooks.  This is a great resource that we will use all year, so we are introducing it in steps.  This week, we started with just the daily sentence editing portion.  Students complete all editing and note-taking in the back of their notebooks, and we work towards the front.  This allows them to always have editing and grammar lessons at their fingertips. So again, we started  by reviewing grammar rules and completing and discussing sentence editing.  On Friday, we began practice with cursive writing.  This is just a reminder that students need to make their work presentable.  

Science and Social Studies will share time.  We will teach each subject alone, one unit at a time.  We will start the year with our Missouri conservation unit on ecosystems.  We started off  with a pretest.  We then moved into books reading the difference between living an non-living things.

Math began with numbers and their place value. We worked on place values through hundred thousand, and hundred million.

Until next week!