October 7th-11th, 2013

Happy weekend 4th grade families!

I finally got out to Wilson's Orchard this weekend! It was a bit overcast and chilly when I went but not too bad where I couldn't pick up some yummy goodies and pumpkins to decorate the classroom with! :) Here is a quick curriculum update of this upcoming week:

Reading: Our essential question this week is, "How can movies express facts and opinions?" Our main selection, Coming Distractions: Questioning Movies, will center around all things cinematography! This will help us practice our comprehension strategies in a fun way. We will be working on finding fact versus opinions within a text as well as summarizing a piece of writing.

Writing: This week we will be focusing on writing responses to literature and drafting opinion pieces. After two weeks we have finished our fictional narratives! Some student's final pieces of work were up to 12 PAGES! Amazing work. The stories are now published in a giant binder and are a part of our classroom library! :)

Spelling: Our spelling pattern this week focuses on vowel sounds with the letter o. ("ooh" sound as in bloom and the sound in cook) Students have been performing fabulously on spelling tests- thank you for your continued support at home! Here is this week's list:

1. bloom
2. cookbook
3. tool
4. shampoo
5. put
6. wool
7. stool
8. proof
9. prove
10. group
11. brook
12. foolish
13. bush
14. crooked
15. booth
16. raccoon
17. hook
18. groom
19. roof
20. soup

Math: We will be starting Unit 3 this week. Unit 3 has four main sections/goals:
1. To review strategies for solving multiplication facts and to help students work toward instant recall of multiplication facts
2. To continue to practice interpreting data and units of measurement
3. To practice solving number stories and word problems
4. To provide practice with number sentences

In this unit we will focus the majority of time on multiplication and facts and word problems. Both of these concepts can be tricky for some students because it involves higher-order thinking, logic, as well as extending on knowledge of basic facts. We ask for continued support at home for practicing flashcards- triangles will also be sent home every night with students. After initial pre-tests of the unit, the facts that are the most difficult for students are 6's, 7's, 8's, and 9's. Ultimately automatic recall of facts is important, but also conceptual understanding. (Teaching the "trick" with 9's, 7 x 8 is really the number 7 added up 8 times, etc.) A family letter will be sent home with students on Monday with basic information about the unit as well as answers to home links. Students will be sent home with Unit 2 tests mid-week- We ask that you sign these and return them so that we can graph our scores in our data binders and see our improvement from the pre-test!

Science: Tomorrow marks the end of our Earth Materials unit! Students received an assignment this weekend to pick some rocks to bring to school on Monday to share with the class. There is also a riddle assignment with it- After your child picks some rocks out, they will write a riddle for you describing one of them (describing basic properties) and you have to figure it out! Any family participation would be much appreciated, they can do it with friends as well!

We will not be having science tests this year, rather "3, 2, 1" checks. (Three things I learned in this unit, 2 questions I have, 1 of my favorite science activities was...) The standards of our science unit are based upon their participation in investigations and ability to record data accurately- Memorizing vocabulary is not the goal of these hands-on investigations! We will be starting social studies next week- More details to come soon!

Other events/reminders:
Thank you SO much for supporting your child with their reading logs! We had 24/25 students turn in their calendars- Such a fabulous improvement. As a class, we have read 15,322 minutes for the month of September and 22/25 students met their goal of 200 minutes! (Obviously many went way over their goal!) Our class goal was 10,000 minutes, so to celebrate we are going to have a PJ Day this Friday! (I haven't told them its next Friday yet!) This will be the same day as our Lucky 7 Pizza Party! Thank you to our room parent, Julie Gros-Louis for making a sign-up sheet on bringit.com in order to make this happen! Any donations you can submit would be much appreciated. It means so much to the students to know that their fabulous behavior and hard work can be rewarded and recognized in fun ways.

Phew! I know this was a long one but there were lots of items to cover. Thank you for all that you do and have a fabulous week.

-Ms. Shapleigh