Hello to all of our "4H" families after our first week of school!
What a full and busy week this has been! I so enjoyed meeting each of you on Orientation Day, and it was so helpful to be able to have our first conversations about your 4th grader. I feel like I had so much I wanted to share with you, and I appreciated having that chance to fill you in on so many details. These newsletters will give you all a chance to stay caught up on events and activities week by week. I will be emailing my notes to our classroom group - if you would prefer additional email destinations, or want to change where my notes go, feel free to email me your preferences, and I can adjust the list. I will also be copying my newsletters to our classroom blog each week.
With each of the past three days in our classroom, our group has become more and more of a community. We've had such a solid beginning to getting acquainted with each other. We have two students in our room who are new to West Middleton this year, and I am very pleased and proud to see how welcoming and helpful and friendly our classmates have been. It is a priority in our room to treat each other with respect and helpfulness, and I saw many examples of that each day already. Miss Carlson, our student teacher, and I have really enjoyed seeing how each of our students has opened up more each day, sharing their personalities and ideas and stories.
We have spent much of each day introducing our class to many of the expectations and routines we will be following throughout the year. We are already getting very efficient about transitioning quickly and quietly between our desks and carpet meeting area, and achieving "pencil" straight and quiet lines in the hallways and after recesses (a beautiful sight to behold!). We've been practicing quick responses to our classroom signal for attention (ask your student about "uno, dos, tres..."). Time spent perfecting these skills pays off all year in very few wasted minutes. With every year, I feel more and more the pressure to make every minute we are together more productive, because there is so very much to learn!
We also got an amazing start toward developing "stamina". We are all challenging ourselves to extend the number of minutes each day that we can ALL remain focused, without a single interruption, on our reading and writing. The kids are all motivated to see how long we can go, and we are loving the chances to read and get lost in our books in a pin-drop silent room (we could actually hear the pin drop - even with the ventilation system blowing!). I am very much enjoying the groans when the timer goes off after each reading session. I have found that the wonderful benefit of practicing the discipline it takes for this silent reading time transfers to our quiet work times in other subjects!
Thank you to all who indicated that you would be available at certain points to help us out with special events like field trips, classroom celebrations, and some classwork. Some of you expressed to me that you might be willing to be a PTO classroom representative and/or a room parent. If we have more than one doing this, you can work as a team, making it super easy. Would you please email me if you are willing to help out here, and then I will put you in touch with each other? Thanks so much! I can share my family email list with you so it will be easy to send out PTO news notes, or any other notes for our classroom families.
Please take note: After the first two days, we saw it became necessary to rearrange our Daily Schedule in several ways! Most notably, our lunch time is now 11:10 to 11:40. That change resulted in changes to our reading and writing blocks. I sent home a revised Daily Schedule grid, so hopefully you found it in your 4th grader's Take Home Folder. I have also made the changes to the Schedule Page on our classroom blog.
On Monday, we begin our first math lesson in our new journals. We will also take the next steps with our Reader's Workshop and Writer's Workshop, and begin getting acquainted with our beautiful state of Wisconsin. I will begin daily posts to our blog's Homework Page. Please always feel free to email me any of your questions or concerns, and any notes about your child that I should know - it's so helpful! If you call my classroom number, I will always return your call as soon as I possibly can.
I am so excited to have your children in my room this year, and I look forward to sharing all the challenges and triumphs of Fourth Grade with them and with you. Melanie
No comments:
Post a Comment