Hello! I so enjoyed the chances to meet with all of our families this past week at conferences! I am so glad you could attend, and having your son or daughter there made it even more meaningful for all of us, I do believe. Another event that touched the hearts of all who attended was on Monday night at the Middleton High School Performing Arts Center. Seeing our West Middleton families fill that big, beautiful theater to watch and listen to our students dance and sing always makes me smile from ear to ear with pride to be a part of this school community.
This week back in Room 117, we have been highly distracted by three eggs and the two magnificent bald eagle parents who both patiently take their turn day and night to sit on those eggs to keep them warm. There is a web cam mounted above a massive 6 foot wide nest, 80 feet high, in a tree over a trout stream in Decorah, Iowa, and we are using our Smartboard to see through the lens of that camera. If you want to get your own look (and beware, this IS addicting!), go to www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles . This has been so exciting and fascinating - we get to witness both eagles when they exchange their 'post' over the eggs, when they get up to turn the eggs and to spruce up their nesting material. The camera zooms in to give us a close up view of their sharp eyes and their even sharper beaks (and did you know they have a pink tongue inside that pointy beak?). The website tells us the eggs were laid on February 17, 20, and 24, and the first one is expected to hatch around March 23. You may want to keep a close watch over spring break, and your family will get to witness those fuzzy little eaglets emerge and visibly grow larger with each passing day. What a unique opportunity to witness Nature!
In between glances at our Smartboard screen, we have managed to get some work done! We have begun our new Math Unit 8, which gives us practice figuring out perimeters and areas of rectangles, parallelograms, and triangles. It is a shorter unit this time, and we hope to fit in the unit test before the spring break week. The students are working hard to complete all the assigned pages, which continue to provide practice on fractions and decimals as well. Good stuff! We have begun writing a new story in Language class, in order to practice our logical storytelling and paragraphing skills. The students began with a 'story web' sheet, which contains their ideas and notes jotted down even before the rough draft is written - this seems to make getting started much easier for everyone, and helps with logical sequencing of events. We can't wait to share our ideas and stories with each other! We are also continuing with our class read-aloud, The Birchbark House. We are becoming more familiar with life as it could have been lived by the native Americans in our state before the first European fur traders made their presence known. This is also the subject of Chapter 4 in our Social Studies text, which we will begin next week. Oh, and thanks to Cecilie, we all had a chance to sample a spoonful of wild rice, which many of our classmates had never tried before. We were also able to give ourselves some requested extra time periods for independent, silent reading, which the kids actually cheer for, since many have recently found some really good books they want to get back to. Hooray for that!!
Our students got in some very productive work sessions this week, broke it up with rousing games of Lightning basketball outside in perfect 'summer' weather, took many side trips to see our eagles, and ended with well deserved root beer floats the last hour today, in celebration of my "29th" birthday tomorrow! I was showered with precious handmade cards of good wishes from everyone, and I treasure each one. Thank you, thank you! Enjoy the gorgeous weekend! Melanie Hannam
Friday, March 16, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
March 9, 2012 Weekly Update
Greetings to our 4H Families! I look forward to meeting with you and your student next week, as we look over together projects, papers, and progress during our conferences. In the meantime, it sounds like quite a number of you may be able to meet me at the UW Arboretum on Sunday afternoon from 1 to 3:00. I have as much to learn from the naturalists there about effigy mounds as the students do, so we will all learn together, and get in a beautiful walk as well. Remember that it looks like we are to meet at the Arboretum Visitor Center, 1207 Seminole Hwy. I have made my first sightings of robins this week! Here's hoping any rain holds off on Sunday.
The news of a major solar flare/storm this week was so well timed for the final week of our Space science unit. We viewed some more breathtaking video from the news online and from NASA. We are all keeping an eye out for any chances of seeing some Northern Lights as well. Our student teams gave their planet presentations this week, and we filled ourselves to the brim with amazing facts about our solar system. This unit has been so much fun for all of us - we kind of hate to see it end. But we must move on! Until we are ready to tackle our Rocks and Minerals unit, we are progresssing in social studies to the next stage of our Wisconsin history with the arrival of the first European explorers.
This coming Monday will be a very full day. Everyone will want to eat a healthy breakfast before coming to school. We start off our first hour math class with the Unit 7 Test on Fractions and Probability. After a short break for a snack, all the 4th graders will board buses around 10:15 for a trip to the MHS PAC where they will have their dress rehearsal with Mrs. Bodell and Mr. Rykal for that evening's choral concert. Just a reminder: Families can arrive around 6:15pm, the concert begins at 6:30, lasts for 30 to 45 minutes, and all students are to wear jeans, their WM Tie Dye T-shirt, and tennis shoes. This is always such a heartwarming show to watch for parents and teachers alike. An early "Bravo!" to Mrs. Bodell for making this all possible and memorable! When our students get back to school, it will be time for Gym Class, and then Lunch from 12:30 to 1:00! This is a big change from our usual schedule, with a later lunch by a good hour - hence the need for a good breakfast and a snack after math.
Speaking of 'breakfast' - today we had a pizza breakfast at 8:30 in math class! The kids have all worked hard the last three weeks to master several new and challenging skills with fractions, so we figured we deserved to 'practice' dividing several whole pizzas into halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, eighths, and even twelfths and sixteenths! It was fun and delicious - and even educational! :).
We can fill you in with more details of our work in 4th grade when we meet next week, so until then... Melanie Hannam
The news of a major solar flare/storm this week was so well timed for the final week of our Space science unit. We viewed some more breathtaking video from the news online and from NASA. We are all keeping an eye out for any chances of seeing some Northern Lights as well. Our student teams gave their planet presentations this week, and we filled ourselves to the brim with amazing facts about our solar system. This unit has been so much fun for all of us - we kind of hate to see it end. But we must move on! Until we are ready to tackle our Rocks and Minerals unit, we are progresssing in social studies to the next stage of our Wisconsin history with the arrival of the first European explorers.
This coming Monday will be a very full day. Everyone will want to eat a healthy breakfast before coming to school. We start off our first hour math class with the Unit 7 Test on Fractions and Probability. After a short break for a snack, all the 4th graders will board buses around 10:15 for a trip to the MHS PAC where they will have their dress rehearsal with Mrs. Bodell and Mr. Rykal for that evening's choral concert. Just a reminder: Families can arrive around 6:15pm, the concert begins at 6:30, lasts for 30 to 45 minutes, and all students are to wear jeans, their WM Tie Dye T-shirt, and tennis shoes. This is always such a heartwarming show to watch for parents and teachers alike. An early "Bravo!" to Mrs. Bodell for making this all possible and memorable! When our students get back to school, it will be time for Gym Class, and then Lunch from 12:30 to 1:00! This is a big change from our usual schedule, with a later lunch by a good hour - hence the need for a good breakfast and a snack after math.
Speaking of 'breakfast' - today we had a pizza breakfast at 8:30 in math class! The kids have all worked hard the last three weeks to master several new and challenging skills with fractions, so we figured we deserved to 'practice' dividing several whole pizzas into halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, eighths, and even twelfths and sixteenths! It was fun and delicious - and even educational! :).
We can fill you in with more details of our work in 4th grade when we meet next week, so until then... Melanie Hannam
Saturday, March 3, 2012
March 2, 2012 Weekly Update
Hello! Thank you for sending in your time preferences for our upcoming Parent/Student/Teacher Conferences on March 13, 14, 15th. This coming week I will send home the master schedule so you can confirm the date and time and get it on your calendar. I look forward to seeing you all again, and giving your 4th grader the chance to show you his/her work over the last months.
The second Box Tops Contest ended with this week, and we will see how it all turns out. Our class has ended up with 675 Box Tops collected over the last 5 weeks - a proud and healthy total (though a first grade and a second grade really walloped us this time, so we will be excited to hit a hopeful third place finish). The kids never lost their enthusiasm, and it has been so much fun to see their spirit. Thank you, families, for your patient support!
This past week, designated Literacy Week at West Middleton, ended with an exciting visit on Friday afternoon by three Badger football players and Bucky Badger himself, all there in support of the value of READING. It was quite the sight to see these 'tough' big football players sit in front of our kids reading Dr. Seuss out loud to all of us.
Back in Room 117, we kept ourselves very busy all week with teamwork on Planets Research. Our teams will be ready in the next week to present their posters and reports, and displays of their efforts should make it up on the hallway wall outside our door just in time for your conference visit. This project has proven to be an effective way for this group of students to learn. They are so motivated to dig into research and have done a wonderful job of working together.
In Social Studies class, shifting into the study of the early people of Wisconsin and how hard they worked to stay alive has provided all of us with some new perspectives. I think it has been an eye opener for our students to consider the comparative ease of our daily lives as we read and discuss what it took to live in the earliest days of the Paleo, Archaic, Mississipian, Woodland, Oneota, and Objibwe Native American tribes. Our class read-aloud, The Birchbark House, ties in so perfectly with the pages of our new social studies textbook. Yesterday, for instance, we marveled at what it took to 'tan' moose hide just to make a piece of soft leather for clothing, shoes, or their houses. Ask your student about that one!
Math class this past week has had us jumping into new territory for everyone as we practice computation with fractions with like and unlike denominators, finding equivalent fractions, reducing fractions, and comparing sizes of fractions. It takes several lessons to get these skills near the secure level, so I encourage everyone to hang in there and keep trying. The kids are discovering that what seems confusing the first day often becomes so much more clear the next day, and even better the third day. Those students who use their time well to work on lessons and come to me during resource time to ask for more practice are the ones who are finding the most success at mastery. Way to go!
Melanie Hannam
The second Box Tops Contest ended with this week, and we will see how it all turns out. Our class has ended up with 675 Box Tops collected over the last 5 weeks - a proud and healthy total (though a first grade and a second grade really walloped us this time, so we will be excited to hit a hopeful third place finish). The kids never lost their enthusiasm, and it has been so much fun to see their spirit. Thank you, families, for your patient support!
This past week, designated Literacy Week at West Middleton, ended with an exciting visit on Friday afternoon by three Badger football players and Bucky Badger himself, all there in support of the value of READING. It was quite the sight to see these 'tough' big football players sit in front of our kids reading Dr. Seuss out loud to all of us.
Back in Room 117, we kept ourselves very busy all week with teamwork on Planets Research. Our teams will be ready in the next week to present their posters and reports, and displays of their efforts should make it up on the hallway wall outside our door just in time for your conference visit. This project has proven to be an effective way for this group of students to learn. They are so motivated to dig into research and have done a wonderful job of working together.
In Social Studies class, shifting into the study of the early people of Wisconsin and how hard they worked to stay alive has provided all of us with some new perspectives. I think it has been an eye opener for our students to consider the comparative ease of our daily lives as we read and discuss what it took to live in the earliest days of the Paleo, Archaic, Mississipian, Woodland, Oneota, and Objibwe Native American tribes. Our class read-aloud, The Birchbark House, ties in so perfectly with the pages of our new social studies textbook. Yesterday, for instance, we marveled at what it took to 'tan' moose hide just to make a piece of soft leather for clothing, shoes, or their houses. Ask your student about that one!
Math class this past week has had us jumping into new territory for everyone as we practice computation with fractions with like and unlike denominators, finding equivalent fractions, reducing fractions, and comparing sizes of fractions. It takes several lessons to get these skills near the secure level, so I encourage everyone to hang in there and keep trying. The kids are discovering that what seems confusing the first day often becomes so much more clear the next day, and even better the third day. Those students who use their time well to work on lessons and come to me during resource time to ask for more practice are the ones who are finding the most success at mastery. Way to go!
Melanie Hannam
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