Monday, December 1, 2014

December Update

December Already?!?

 It was so nice to meet with so many of you before Thanksgiving.  I hope everyone enjoyed some time off!
Thank you for having your children complete and return the Scholastic News packets.  Any work they did, truly helped them to stay the course as we get ready for another extended vacation in a few weeks.

Reminders:  

Wednesday December 3rd -Holiday Shop
Thursday December 4th-Northeast States and Capitals Map Quiz (spelling counts)
Friday December 5th- Be Unique Spirit Day- be the best you!
Friday December 12th- all unwrapped gift donations for our Gingerbread family are due.
Tuesday December 23rd at 10:30 - Town Meeting
Holiday Vacation begins on Wednesday December 24th and school begins again on Monday January 5th. 


Here's what we've been up to and what we are up to in 4C...

Reading - Students have been working on identifying the theme of short readings.  They must also provide two pieces of evidence from the text to support their theme.  We will be working on numerous themes throughout the year and the children will be very familiar with them by the end.  Next we are going to take an intermission from theme to revisit the concept of inferring.  Inferring is when you use what you know (your schema) and what the text says to draw conclusions about a characters feelings, thoughts, motivations or even what is happening in the book.  We will then start to discuss points of view from which a story is told.  We will talk about first person and third person and identify the point of view in a story as well as write from different points of view. 

Displaying image.jpegWriting- We have finished our Narrative unit, which included both personal and fictional narratives.  The students wrote two of each.  Many of you had the opportunity to look through your child's binder to see some of the writing.  Although, only a few pieces make it to publication, the students have been doing lots and lots of writing and through conferences, I have really gotten to know them as writers.  Our next unit for the whole semester is Opinion Writing.  Students will learn how to back up their opinions with reasons and how to organize their writing to really make their audience understand their views.  This is my favorite unit of writing personally!

Displaying image.jpegMath-We have made it to the big leagues in math!  We have entered double digit multiplication.  Our first lesson was today and it went pretty well!  We start small and work our way up to four digits on the top and no more than two digits on the bottom.  I know I am being redundant, but please make sure your child is still practicing their multiplication facts each week.  Knowing them will make this whole process much easier to understand and is the reason we have our mad minutes twice per week.  We will be starting long division before the break!

Displaying image.jpegS.S.- We have finished our unit on the Northeast and are having our map test this Thursday.  Some of the students have completed flip books or brochures about a Northeast state that are hanging up in the classroom.   We have begun our short unit on Rhode Island and the students have read about Roger Williams.  We will be continuing with the history of Rhode Island and  next we will be visiting the Midwest region.

Displaying image.jpegScience- We have finally finished erosion.  We've have done plenty of experiments and the students are ready to move on.  This week we will be beginning our Matter Unit and we will have lots of fun experiments with that as well.  This unit is slightly less messy than the last one, but still lots of fun.

Here are some pictures from our final erosion experiment.  The students were testing out the effect of wind erosion on sand dunes and seeing if dune grass actually can prevent erosion. 

Displaying image.jpegDisplaying image.jpeg