This Week in 4th Grade.....

It should be an exciting week in school!  On Tuesday we will have a school-wide spirit day.  The kids are encouraged to wear black and orange for Halloween. 

If your child is getting his/her picture retaken or if your child wasn't here for our original picture day, retakes will take place on Wednesday, November 1st!



There was a lot of excitement as the kids entered the classrooms each morning last week.  On Friday, our LL Corner store was open for business.  The kids had a chance to count up their LL Bucks and decide if they wanted to spend it on an item in the store or save it for the future.  Gum Day is certainly a reward that many kids are saving for.  

Invention Convention

In an effort to build excitement as students enter the door in the morning, foster creativity and engineering skills and build our cooperative learning abilities, we launched our "Invention Convention" this week!  Students were placed into teams and were provided with a random object that had no apparent use.  As a team, students needed to invent a use for the object and create a poster to market their object to others.  Prior to beginning, teamwork strategies were discussed with an emphasis on solving disagreements and sharing the decision making role.  Each morning this past week students worked on their inventions as part of their morning work.  It was fantastic to see students so excited to enter the classroom in the morning and to see the creativity that was flowing through our rooms!  Below are some pictures of our inventors hard at work.

Reader's Workshop

This week we focused on increasing our passion for reading and building ourselves up to be more successful when reading at home.  We reviewed expectations for reading at home and discussed why we should be reading the same book at school and home.  We also practiced recommending books.  You can see students sharing the books they are excited about with each other in the pictures below.  I also spent a lot of time checking in with students regarding their book choices and whether or not they were enjoying their books this week.  On Friday I asked all students, on a scale of 0 - 5, how much they were enjoying the book they were currently reading.  Nearly all students reported either a 4 or a 5!

As always, please let me know if you are seeing any struggles with book enjoyment or willingness to read and I will be happy to help.

Math Workshop

We finished up Module 1 last week.  On Friday, the kids took the Module 1 Assessment.  I am really proud of the kids for using the Effective Effort strategies of time, focus, and resourcefulness.  We talked a lot about using our resources as a tool to help us to be successful.  We will be taking a look at our assessments this week and using feedback to revise one or more of our answers where needed.  You can expect to see the assessment coming home later this week.  When your child brings home his/her assessment, please sign the page stating that you have received it and send it back to school with your child.

We will be starting our next unit, Module 2 this week.  It is a quick unit on the metric system. 

I hope everyone has a great week!

Jen and Jaime