Week of January 28th

Important Dates to Remember:

• Friday, January 25th:  Half Day - Dismissal at 11:40
• Wednesday, February 6th: Music Instrument Demo for interested 4th graders - 4:00-5:00.  
• February 12-14: Book Fair
• Friday, February 15th: Half Day - Dismissal at 11:40
• February 18-22nd: Winter Break 
• Monday, February 25th: Return to School 

Valentine's Day Party:  The Valentine's Day Party is fast approaching and will take place on Valentine's Day at 10:00.  I think we have most of the activities planned but could use another 10 minute activity to fill the time. I'll be sending out the Sign Up Genius for food items and I'll use some of the money collected in the beginning of the year to purchase prizes for the games.  I kept the food pretty light because the party is right before lunch. Your child won't need a snack that day since we'll be snacking at the party.

Math: Our Multiplication unit is well underway and we're learning many multiplication strategies to solve problems.  Partitioned rectangles and partial products are introduced early and will lay the groundwork for longer multiplication problems coming in later units.  We are working in class with partners to have quick recall and accuracy and we'll continue testing on our basic facts once a week.  There are several places in this program where we work on word problems.  Many of these problems are multiple step problems so we start by circling the important information, underling what the problem is asking, making a number model, showing our work and restating the answer in a complete sentence. I know these problems can be very tricky but we're getting good at figuring out what operation to use and how to solve the problems.

Reading:  On most days, we do two reading blocks.  One block is focused on IST and the other block we're doing our read aloud and working on fiction strategies.  For IST, our main focus has been nonfiction summarizing.  This has not been an easy skill but the organizer we're using makes our work a little easier. Most of this work has been guided and soon, the kiddos will be completing a summary independently.  After we get really good at nonfiction summarizing, we'll move onto summarizing fiction pieces.  This will be a very helpful skill as I will beginning reading assessments again in late February.

In writing, we're rolling right along with our persuasive unit. We have analyzed persuasive texts, discussed the audience, topic, and the importance of having strong evidence and examples to back up our claim.  We just finished writing our first piece together and we're finally ready to tackle a piece independently.  When they are finished writing their first piece, they will bring it home for you to review.  You can decide if their evidence was convincing enough and if they had enough supporting evidence to back up their opinion. 

Social Studies: In Social Studies, we're continuing to move through our Geography unit.  This unit also has many vocabulary words the kids will be responsible for so we've started writing them down so they're easier to review.  Some of the things we'll cover in the next couple of weeks are latitude/longitude, relative location and landforms.  I have some fun hands on activities to help reinforce the concepts.

Science: We're in the midst of our Motion and Design unit. This is an engaging unit where students work in design teams to create vehicles according to a given set of criteria.  They modify their vehicles each week based on the scientific principles introduced.  Students have to work together cooperatively in order to solve the problems at hand.  This unit is definitely a favorite for most!