Dear 4A Families,
I want to thank you all for my wonderful birthday celebration on Friday. The cards from the students were the sweetest I have ever received. I also very much appreciate the Macy’s gift card–I really need some new spring clothes. I am so blessed—thank you all.
The Bingo Bash on Friday night was great fun and a great fund raiser for our school! Thank you all for your support. I do want to say the 4th graders were very polite when being served—saying please and thank you! We really appreciated that too!
Class pictures will be taken next Tuesday, April 24. Order forms were sent home last Thursday. Please have your child wear Perfect Uniform, which includes a red sweatshirt, sweater or vest—no ripped knees! Thank you.
Curriculum and Homework:
Religion: We continue to learn about the 10 Commandments in class. The students will be bringing home a study sheet of the 10 Commandments on Tuesday. For this part of the test the students need to be able to fill in missing words of the Ten Commendments. This test will be Friday, April 27th. Fr. Oakland will visit our classroom on Tuesday. Our Second Step lessons will focus on how to manage strong feeling and practice ways to interrupt emotional escalations. These lessons help students regcognize how they are feeling and say in control of powerful emotions. Look for a Home Link assginement to come home. Your child will be teaching you two calming down steps. This sheet will come home on Tuesday. please return the homework completed with your signature no later than Friday, April 20th.
Math: Our lessons will be foucsing on finding equivalent fractions using multiplication and division, finding the simplest form as well as comparing and ordering fractions. We will integrate use of rulers and measurement to find fractions of numbers as well. Look for either fraction homwork or review work on multiplication and division this week.
LA/Spelling: The list for Lesson 22 was sent home before the break. The test will be this Friday as usual. We will be writing friendly letters to our pen pals from Italy this week, and getting them sent out by Friday.
Reading: As we work though the mystery/adventure story of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler, each student will also be required to select a mystery book to be reading at school and home. All selections for the mystery book need to be selected by this Friday, April 20th. Mrs. Davis will go over the mystery section in the library, and I also have quite a few mystery books in my classroom to choose from. There will be some book report activities associated with the mystery books. Some completed at school and one at home. All directions for the project will come home next week. I am asking that books be selected this week, but we will wait to begin reading until next week. When selecting a book, students need to be careful to select books that are true mysteries, with clues, a mystery to be solved and a detective(s).
Flat Stanley/LA: The journals will come home Monday or Tuesday after the first entry is completed pictures have been glued in and captioned. Some reminders as the students work through their journal entries:
- Journal entries must be neatly and thoughtfully A well- written paragraph that includes a topic sentence, at least three-five descriptive sentences and a conclusion is expected. The directions send home have a sample, and you can also access them in the Flat Stanley tab above.
- Each entry needs to have at least one example of figurative langague.
- Word choice is important. Avoid repeating words like “fun”, “great”, “cool”, “then” etc.
- You can find examples of both figurative language and word choice on the Flat Stanley direction page.
Social Studies: The students completed their purchases last week and will dive into the actual Oregon Trail simulation this week. As they travel along the trail they will face challenges such as snake bites and river crossing, hunting successes and failures, lots of decisions and teamwork in their attempt to reach Oregon City.
Science: Before spring break I introduced the concept of a life cycle assessment to the 4th graders. Then we looked at one example from our story where the characters have to gather sticks to build a fire. This week we will further discuss life cycle assessments and brainstorm ways to reduce the environmental impacts of using paper. A life cycle assessment identifies and analyzes all the resources required to create and use a product. It also identifies all of the outputs created from the manufacture, use, and disposal of the product, with a focus on the environmental impacts of those outputs. In class we are using the example of paper making to individually go through the steps of a life cycle assessment.
Homework:
- Spelling Lesson 22. Test will take place on Friday.
- Math homework
- Flat Stanley Journals
- Second Step Home Link due by Friday
- Select and have a mystery book approved by Friday the 20th
- Practice recorders.
Have a super week! Let’s get some sunshine…