Week of October 16th

Dear 4A Families,

I hope you all had a nice weekend. The beautiful fall colors are beginning to appear. Congratulations to 4th grade for being the top magazine selling grade in the school! Special congratulations to Maddy for being the top seller in the school, and to both Luke P. and Melia for being some of the highest sellers in the school as well! Thank you to all of the 4th grade families for your amazing support of the Magazine Sale this year.

The Living Rosary will take place this Friday at 8:30. This is a perfect uniform day. Join us if you are able. Please have students bring in a rosary if they have one on Wednesday. We will be reviewing how to pray the Rosary in class on Wednesday and Thursday to prepare for this special service. I have extra rosaries for those students that need one. Thank you.

Touching Safety Program: Holy Rosary School, along with all the schools in the Archdiocese, will be teaching the third year of the sexual abuse prevention program called Touching Safety. This program is provided to us by the Archdiocese of Seattle and is part of our ongoing effort to help create and maintain a safe environment for children and protect all children from sexual abuse. We will be teaching two lessons again this year. The first will be this month (October), the second in March. For more information I am including this linked detailed program overviewThe topic of the October lesson is Boundaries: Students learn about personal boundaries and how identifying and honoring those boundaries can give a child or young person the self assurance needed to speak up when someone tries to step over the line. The students will bring home a completed worksheet that contains the main points of the lesson.  I encourage you to go over this worksheet with your children to discuss/reinforce the information at home.  If you do not wish your child to take part in these lessons you will need to fill out this opt out form and return it to school by this Thursday the 19th.

Second Step: This week 4th grade is beginning our new Second Step program. The Second Step program for Kindergarten through 5th grade is a classroom-based program designed to increase student’s school success and decrease problem behaviors by promoting social-emotional competence and self-regulation. Students will learn skills that strengthen their ability to learn, have empathy for their classmates, manage emotions, and solve problems. Our first lesson will be on empathy. Expect to see a home-link worksheet to be completed with your child come home on Tuesday and returned to school completed on Friday.

Religion: By the end of the week the reading and singing parts for the All Saint’s Day Mass will be selected.  Even though all students will not have individual speaking or singing parts, they will each play an integral part in the Mass as a representative of their Saint when they “March In”, and reciting the Prayer of St. Francis following Communion. We will be practicing in the Church beginning next Wednesday.

Reading: We are enjoying getting to know the characters in Charlotte’s Web.   The students are finishing up their own Postcards from the Barn, which they will share with you at their conference in November. They will also be on display in the hallway. The vocabulary words that we are focusing on from the story are also on Vocabulary/Spelling City.  Students can review the words and their meanings, which will help them prepare for a final vocabulary test when we finish the book.

Spelling/LA: Spelling lists for Unit 4 were sent home last Friday and the test will be this Friday as usual. The students are doing lots of writing at school! In addition to the Postcards from the Barn, we are also hard at work on our Saint Reports.

Math: The students have been focusing on rounding/estimating sums and differences. This week our focus will be on the accurate addition and subtraction computation of large numbers. Our practice of all of these skills is supported with our online Mathletics activities and Front Row tasks. Both of these sites give the students more opportunities to refine and build skills and experience the same objectives in different ways. Students are always welcome to visit the Mathletics site at home, choosing activities of choice for extra practice, challenge or to practice fact recall in the Live Maths section.

Social Studies: On Tuesday afternoon we will have a fun and educational visit from the Pike Place Market Education Coordinator, Scott Davies.  He will give the students an overview and history of the Market in preparation for our field trip next month.

Our class work in Social Studies will continue to focus on map skills. Look for corrected West/SW State map tests in your child’s filer. Our next set of states will be the Midwest States and the Great Lakes. This test will take place on Thursday, October 26th. Study sheets will be in your child’s filer. I have also made two more online practice sites for this test: Midwest State and Great Lake locations and Midwest State Abbreviations. The abbreviations for these states are a bit tricky, especially the many “M” states.

Science:  We will continue to look at how the energy of the wind can be harnessed to do work. Students will predict which materials will catch the wind the best when used as a sail. They will also observe and describe how different materials and shapes catch the wind better when used as sails when they test their sail designs. They will test their sail designs by measuring how far down a track their sails move a raft when blown by a fan. The goal is for the students to compare the performance of different sails and decide which properties have the greatest effect on sail performance. Homework this week is a student reflection data lab sheet on Tuesday for 4B and Thursday for 4A.

Homework Overview: Look for math homework on Monday and Wednesday, spelling practice on Thursday night, Empathy sheet will come home Tuesday and is due by Friday, Midwest State review.  Students also have a Spanish packet (that should be mostly completed) that is due on Tuesday.

Have a great week everyone. It looks like there will be the possibility for rain for much of the week. Please send your child with a raincoat to school—better safe than sorry! Also, if you have not done so already, all sweatshirts and coats should be labeled with the your child’s name, and remember all students need to wear a red Holy Rosary sweatshirt, sweater or vest on Wednesday Mass days. Thank you!