This week in 4th grade....

Happy Monday!  Hopefully everyone was able to enjoy the long weekend.  It will be another short week with lots of learning planned!  

Writer’s Workshop

We spent the beginning of last week finishing up the Literary Essay End of Unit Assessment.  This week your child will be bringing home a scored rubric along with directions on how you can see all of the progress your child made throughout this unit.  Be on the lookout for this information by midweek!

It was an exciting day when the kids found out that our next writing unit would be Realistic Fiction!  We talked about how authors need to come up with many ideas before they actually write.  We learned some strategies for coming up with ideas such as the “what if” strategy and the “mix and match story elements” strategy.  Ask your child what strategy was working the best for him/her.

Reader's Workshop

This past week we wrapped up inferring theme and further honed our skills of writing about our reading.  Next week we will jump into comparing and contrasting texts.  We will learn about the language we can use to help us compare and contrast and learn how to write about these ideas.

Students are still expected to read for 20 minutes every night.  I tried to check in with as many families as I could at some point over the fall to see how this was going and how I might support families.  I will start checking in again this week.  Please let me know if your child has hit a rut!

Book orders are due by Wednesday.  Our online ordering code is H3M9C.  This is a great time of year to cozy up with a good book!

Math Workshop

We will be wrapping up Module 3 this week.  Last week we continued to work on division, but started to think about what remainders mean in a word problem.  This takes a lot of practice, but I was already starting to see that the kids were really trying to think through the problems to help them answer the questions in word problems.  We will (hopefully) be assessing this Module by the end of the week and then will be moving onto Geometry!

Science

We continued along with our Sound unit in science.  The kids were so thrilled to learn another method for communicating which was Morse Code.  I am sure many of them came home speaking to you with a lot of “dits” and “dahs.”  It is so exciting to see the enthusiasm around this lesson.  The kids had fun creating words in Morse Code and then trying to have a partner decipher what they were saying.  This week we will be comparing Morse Code to the “code” that whales speak.

Social Studies

We started a new unit last week on Mapping the United States.  It is a short unit that will review map skills and land-forms and will prepare students to learn about the regions of the United States.  We got hands-on with globes and began exploring the Northern and Southern Hemisphere and using latitude to locate different places.  Included are some pictures of students doing just that!

                  

Thank you to the families that sent in tissues, disinfectant wipes, and paper towels. It is greatly appreciated!  Have a great week!

~ Jaime and Jen