September 23- 27

Chugging Along

We are starting to settle in.  I hope that your child feels like they are getting the swing of things in the fourth grade.  I feel like last week was a catch up week for me, but I feel a little better after today.  

As a reminder, my Blog will typically be updated earlier in the day on Monday, but we were having technology issues this morning, so it took me a little while longer today.  

In Math this week, we are preparing for our test on addition and subtraction on Monday.  Most students are doing really well in addition, but some are needing some extra help on subtraction.  I had each student take home their Math Binders today so that you could take a look at their progress so far.  They also have a test to study for!  Their test will be tomorrow.  They have a form of what the test questions will look like as homework tonight.  Their test will have the same questions, but the answers will NOT be multiple choice.  You may go over their answers with them, instead of them looking for the closest choice answer.  Just a study idea.  On Wednesday, students will move onto time.  We will read clocks, and look at elapsed time.  

Science this week will be short and sweet.  Today,we did a food chain activity.  We will quiz tomorrow using our books.  For extra help tonight, you may try going to http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/ and search for food chains, producers and consumers to play some review games.  On Wednesday, we will begin our first look at Social Studies.  We will begin by just becoming familiar with our book.  We will then take a closer look at the Pledge of Allegiance.  These will start us into the study of our state and economics, which we study in fourth grade.  

In Reading, students will continue their book study on Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.  As a class, we discuss the story structure as we read each day.  The class really seems to enjoy the book.  We added in small group Literature Circles today.  We divided the class into small groups of "like" readers.  They we given an independent reading task with a job to do about their reading.  They will meet back together at a given date, and we will discuss their books, and will be assigned a new job.  All books are on a "school" theme and have a humorous side!  What I am excited about is that all of the books we are reading together give students opportunities to achieve AR points.  Hopefully the close study of these books provides for some "easy" points.

In Writing, we are learning about parts of speech.  Monday, we learned about nouns and verbs.  Tuesday, we will study adjectives.  Wednesday we will look at pronouns.  Thursday students will study adverbs, and Friday interjections and conjunctions.  We will take a small amount of notes, watch a Schoolhouse Rock video, and play a short game each day with the concepts studied.  We will then use our Writer's Notebooks to begin learning some strategies to increase our writing stamina and creativity.  We will use picture books to help us with this.  

In Spelling, students will finish taking a closer look at /k/ sounds.  Words that have k, ck, ch, qu, and c are common spelling patterns.  We will test those on Tuesday, along with other common words.  We will begin new words on Wednesday.  We will also integrate other words that follow these spelling patterns found in our other lessons.  This unit we will study long /e/ spelling patterns, surprise words, digraphs (th, ph, ch, sh, wh), and homophones (there, their, and they're).