Week of September 21st

 Hi Families! Happy Friday!

We've had a busy week in fourth grade! 

Thank you for sending in pictures of your child's favorite reading spot! I have loved seeing their favorite places to cozy up with a book. They made frames for their pictures and we displayed them in the classroom. If you didn't get a chance to send in a picture and your child would still like too - feel free to email me the picture and we will add it our display!

We worked together to come up with some classroom rules. Based off what the students came up with, I made a chart that I have hanging on the board. Here are the rules we came up with:

This week I started choosing students to share during the "Share" portion of our Morning Meeting routine. We select students to share the Friday before the following week. I told students it is okay if they'd like to share about an object from home but that instead of bringing it in, a parent can send me a picture and I will project the picture on the board as they share. This just helps us refrain from letting anything important get lost at school.

We have our first birthday next week! Unfortunately, treats (even pre-packaged store-bought treats) are not allowed this year. Instead, on your child's birthday, they will choose the activity, greeting, and get to share. They can also bring in a book to share with the class.We will try to do an extra activity on their birthday as well. Thanks for understanding! I know, it's a bummer that we can't celebrate with treats.

Daily Health Screening: Please see this link for daily health screening. Parents should go through each of these questions with their child before the start of each school day.

Upcoming Events:

September 24th: Virtual Family Night

September 25th: No School

September 30th: Picture Day

September 30th: Ms. Burris is out for training (I will be in the building though)

October 1st: Ms. Burris is out for training (I will be in the building though)

October 1st: Unit 1 Math Test

Curriculum Update:

Reading: We have been working hard to summarize what we are reading, making greater predictions, and creating and recognizing our reading goals. For summarizing, some of us stop after each chapter to summarize the chapter, while others are stopping at the end of each book to summarize the whole text. We've been making predictions about our read aloud text, The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin and about our own books. As we make these predictions, were self evaluating and determining is it a Level 1, 2, or 3 prediction? We are also working as partnerships to create and discuss reading goals. Be sure to ask your child what they are reading, what are their current goals, and what are their accomplished goals.

Writing: We finished writing true stories about our lives. We worked really hard to incorporate and to continue writing with DAST (dialogue, actions, senses, thinking). We will now write fiction stories. We started the beginning and middle of our fiction stories today and WOW was I impressed! For our fiction stories, we are using events and situations that really happened to us and changing the characters names, setting, etc, so that is is a mystery if it really happened to us or not.

Math: We worked on adding six digit numbers and talked about the importance of estimating an answer before we solve it to see if it is reasonable. This week we will move into subtraction. We will be subtracting large numbers. I will help students understand that one amount is being taken away from another amount, instead of just learning the standard algorithm. (Don't worry, we'll get there) Take a look at this progression of how the brain learns subtraction strategies.

https://gfletchy.com/progression-videos/

Word Study: We are finishing our first unit this week. We learned about short vowels, short vowel exceptions, and some long vowel words. We will be moving on to unit two. There will be another packet coming home tonight. Remember, these are just for practice, but they are very helpful in your child's spelling development. Unit two is all about suffixes. We will learn about vowel suffixes and consonant suffixes. We will work on understanding the difference between the base word and the suffix. For example: tallest - tall is the base word and -est is the suffix.

Content: We are finishing up our study on geography and researching these questions:

Where is Wisconsin?

 What and where are the 7 continents?

What and where are the 5 oceans?

How can you identify the physical features and land forms in the world?

Please never hesitate to reach out if you have any questions, concerns, etc! Have a great weekend!

Carly Burris