October Update

I can't believe it is almost October!  This month has flown by and we are really in the swing of things.  Here is what we've been up to.


Reading: For the first few weeks we worked on  setting up our reading library.  The students all received their reading levels and selected books on that level.  They now have book bags with three books in them.  Two free choice books, one can be a chapter book and one can be a picture book if they choose, and one book on their level from our classroom library.

Last week we made reading salad.  Reading is a combination of thinking and text.  We brainstormed what we think about when we read and came up with: asking questions, making connections, visualizing, and inferring.  Every time we stopped to talk about text, we put a red card in the salad bowl, for each "thought" we had we put a green card.

This week we are looking for interesting language and thinking about why the author might have used it and why we think it is interesting.

Writing:  We have been working on reviewing constructed response format and practicing incorporating details from the text into our reading responses.  We have also been working on building our writer's notebook ideas to begin our first narrative, which will be a realistic fiction story.

Human Number Line

Math:  We have completed chapter one in our math books, which was all about place value, comparing numbers and rounding numbers up to the millions.  We are currently finishing up chapter 2 which includes estimating sums and differences, and adding and subtracting large numbers with and without regrouping.  We will be moving on to understanding factors and multiples and generating and analyzing patterns after this.

Math Facts:  It is imperative that students know their math facts as it will make other concepts  taught in fourth grade math that much easier to learn.  Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday we take a fast fact timed test.  It begins with addition and subtraction and moves on to multiplication.  Congratulations to our first few rounds of students who have passed and moved on to the next level!

S.S.  We have been working on studying the seven continents and the oceans.  Students have had some practice with latitude and longitude, hemispheres, and directions, as well as creating their own globes.  We will be moving on to studying landforms and climates of our country and then narrow our geography down by regions of the United States.  Each region will have a states and capitals map test that accompanies it throughout the year.

Science:  Last week we completed our first scientific method together by doing an experiment.  Students worked together to investigate which tennis ball bounced the highest:  a room temperature ball, a refrigerated ball and a frozen ball.  Our results were unanimously the room temperature ball. This week we introduced erosion and the students will be doing lots of messy experiments with sand, dirt and water, which they are all very excited about!