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
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