Hello to all of our 4H Families! I am very much looking forward to meeting with you all during the next two weeks for our parent/student/teacher conferences. Your student and I will have some work samples to show you, and we can talk about some goals to make 4th grade be the most successful and satisfying year for your child possible. In the meantime, here are some updates on the learning that has been happening in Room 117 lately!
We have switched gears in Literacy over the last week. Our Realistic Fiction projects have been wrapped up. Yesterday we placed all of our hard work, from very messy, important rough draft pages to our neatest handwriting final copies, into our special Writing Binders. This work reflects a valuable baseline for where our 4th graders are with their ability to follow the story arc from grabbing beginnings, through complete sentences and paragraphs, character and plot development, to a realistic, satisfying ending. Now we all know some necessary areas on which to work as we continue our writing lives this year. We are now developing our skills with Essay writing. This week our whole class went through 'essay writing boot camp'. In two class periods as a whole group we created our first complete essay together, and now we have a model to follow as each student gets to writing their own thesis statements with reasons and evidence to back up their opinions. Switching from fiction writing to more formalized opinion writing brings some groans at first, but after putting together our first essay as a class, and getting to choose their own first topic where they may have strong feelings, the mood has changed to pride and some heartfelt writing. So cool!
In Readers' Workshop, while our students continue to devour many favorite fiction books, we are also diving into a very diverse collection of nonfiction sources. We are going to be analyzing the best ways to read nonfiction, how to pick out the most important points, and how this can help us be efficient researchers of new information. Warning - your student may be coming home with some new facts and information to share! In Social Studies, that has hopefully already been happening! (Ask your student what is special about Wisconsin's location in the world with respect to latitude and longitude!) We will be moving into the world of our state's Ice Age in the coming days, and how that has affected our landscape and ways of living here to this day. Science class with Mrs. Bertz is moving through their unit on Rocks and Minerals, and your students had a quiz on Minerals this past week.
We are most of the way through Unit 2 in our Bridges Math at this point. We spend a large part of our classes digging into real life (word problem) situations that require us to figure out what equation is needed to solve the problem, and then explore several different ways that equation can be solved. As we all get more comfortable with this format, I am amazed at the creative thinking and reasoning that many of our students are demonstrating. Of course, this kind of 'problem string' thinking does require our students to hang in there with the steps and logical thinking process. If someone gets lost or tunes out at any point, it can be difficult to get back into it. So we are having to practice our stamina to stay engaged and involved with the discussion, and that does take time and practice. I am confident we will see growth throughout the year as our 4th graders mature and develop their skills to stay focused. The key is to keep involved in the discussion, watching, sketching out ideas, asking and answering questions...
Activities outside of our core subject work also continue to keep us all very busy:
Five Swim Classes have begun - the next classes will happen this coming Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, and finally the following Tuesday (November 7, 9, 11, and 15). Students need to bring suits, towels, and a waterproof bag those days! Our gym teachers are also planning an exciting UW Dance Team session and there is a permission form to sign if your 4th grader wants to participate!
Thank you for sending in BOX TOPS as you collect them for us all this month of November. We want to win a Pizza Lunch from the PTO - and of course break a record to collect all we can to help our school!
The November Scholastic Book Order forms came home yesterday - take a look. The deadline for submitting orders is November 14th. Also included is the flyer from our annual Scholastic Book Fair, which will be in our LMC during the official parent conference week, November 15 through 17. I can also give your student the chance to shop there during the school day that week.
Thank you to Mrs. Rosera for sending you the details about these events, along with the announcement about December 14th's Winter Tea and Tunes. With the end of November we come to the end of our first trimester already! The first report card will then get prepared and will come home in the second week of December.
More picture envelopes appeared in my mailbox late Friday, so those will get sent home on Monday.
One 'homework' assignment your student has over the weekend, is to go through their Take Home Folder with you, and decide which papers are to stay home - or need returning with your response - or need to be saved in the folder (such as the master spelling list). Thank you for getting caught up with these papers together. If too many sheets pile up in these folders, it gets too difficult to find important info and meet due dates.
Whew! I will continue to send you email updates for special reminders and news as we go along! As always, I do appreciate your questions and updates about special situations with your own child, and we will get to visit in person over the next two weeks. Remember to check your calendars for our conference time together! See you soon! Melanie Hannam
