Dear 4A Families,
I hope you all enjoyed your Labor Day Weekend. What an excellent first week of school with my wonderful new 4th grade students. It is clear to see that this will be an amazing year—with such a bright, kind, creative and fun group of students. I so enjoyed talking with you on Parent’s Night. Remember, if you have questions, suggestions, concerns, please contact me! We are partners in your child’s learning.
It looks like I have all of the email addresses for our 4A email list. I will be sending one more paper copy of the newsletter on Tuesday, but you should also have received a test email on Monday evening. Please let me know if you did not receive the email, or if you would like to change any of your email choices. You can expect a weekly email from me with the newsletter and occasional emails with important reminders. I promise not to abuse this list! Thank you.
If you have not yet returned your pink student profile, blue iPad user agreement or the three papers sent out last Thursday from our principal,(one yellow and two white) but sure to do so ASAP.
This Friday the 9th is the Magazine Drive Kickoff Assembly. The chairs have requested that it also be a special free dress day. Each class has been assigned a color to wear on Friday to support the theme of showing our true colors. The 4th grade classes have been assigned green as their color. Thank you for helping support this important fundraiser. Look for more information in the eFC.
As we move into our second week of school, we will continue to practice the routines and expectations of 4th grade. The time we spend on these procedures now help to set the stage for a successful year. Our regular curriculum schedule will also start to move into place.
Spelling: Each student should have the spelling words for lesson 22 in their filer. These words were passed out and reviewed last Friday. This week’s words focus on VCCV(vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel) and VCV (vowel-consonant-vowel). In class we will be working with the words and completing activities to support understanding of the patterns. We will also be using a site called Spelling City this year. The site has lots of activities that will help the students review and practice their weekly lists. Your child’s password for the site is in your Parent’s Night packet. Some spelling homework will come from this site.
Reading: Last week Ms. Corrigan began administering an oral reading assessment to the students, which will be completed Tuesday. These assessments, along with a silent reading and vocabulary assessment we will administer this week, will help us to better understand the individual reading needs of each student, and in turn, assist us in our planning for the year. We will be reading a story this week called “I Could Do That” the true story of Esther Morris, who started out life believing she could do anything, and then proved it, by building her own business, raising a family in the Wild West, working to get women the vote for the first time, and becoming the first female judge and the first woman in the US to hold a political office! We will focus on the comprehension strategies of cause and effect and infer and predict.
Language Arts: We will be finishing up some introductory Venn Diagram getting to know you presentations this week. Along with our spelling and vocabulary work, we will be reviewing cursive forms, paper headings and working with an online portfolio we will be using this year.
Math: The students will be taking a beginning of the year math assessment on Tuesday that will help me to better plan for upcoming lessons. Our lessons this week will focus on place value and comparing/ordering numbers. Measurement work will also be included in our math/science/social studies lessons. As a class we will visit the Mathletics site and set up some expectations for use of the site. Look for math homework on Wednesday and Thursday this week.
Religion: We will begin our formal religion lessons this week as we explore our religion texts. We will be doing some introductory activities on the parts of the Bible, how to look up verses, as well as learn a bit about the history of the Bible. Lastly, the students will be making personalized bookmarks for their Bibles. Last Friday Fr. Oakland blessed the 4th grade Bibles at our Opening Mass.
Social Studies/Science: –Mrs. Podell and I will be switching classes for science and social studies on Mondays and Tuesdays this year. This week we will be meeting our classes and doing some introductory lessons. In social studies, our initial lessons will focus map work. We will review the continents and oceans and begin a study of latitude and longitude. Next Tuesday, September 13th, the 4th graders will be tested on the Seven Continents and Five Oceans. All students will have study sheets in their filers on Tuesday. You can also access a study sheet on the 4A webpage under the tab at the top of our page called Map Study Sheets.The students will also need to have the Continent and Ocean poem memorized by September 20th.
Be on the lookout for information on our “gritty” classroom in next week’s newsletter. Grit and Growth Mindset fall into the same category. This short video is a good introduction to growth mindset. These are the traits we will be forcing on this year to become gritty!