Greetings to our 4H Families! What a different kind of week we have had! That flu virus certainly must be highly contagious - we were missing a full third of our students in Room 117 for three days in a row! By Friday, we still had one friend out ill, with everyone else making it back in varying stages of recovery, but with smiles all around - we are all glad to get most everyone back together, and hopefully over the worst of this 'storm'. We have gone through our room daily with Clorox wipes in hopes this will help - thank you to those who donated more of these containers to our room! We will keep up the extra wiping for awhile yet!
We tried our best to walk the fine line between progressing with our lessons, but not going so far that it would be overly difficult for our missing friends to catch up. We did an extra review in math today to make sure all felt ready for the Unit 5 Test, which will take place Tuesday. Fifth grade students will also be taking their unit test on Tuesday. The 4th graders should have their unit review sheets in their take home folders, and I encouraged them to use sample problems from those to refresh memories before coming back to school next Tuesday. Multiplying with two digit numbers and rounding off numbers in the hundreds and thousands are a big part of the 4th grade test.
We took several of our literacy class times this week to practice writing Haiku poetry, with the goal of identifying two best poems each student can submit to the Dane County Contest. I am so amazed and impressed with the creative writing our students produced - wow! Many of them really got the idea quickly, and enjoyed doing these - I think I may post some of their Haiku on our blog next week to give you a peek at their clever 'wordsmithing'. All poetry attempts are being saved to each student's writing binders. More work on writing this week included each student developing a complete fictional character in preparation for writing a realistic fictional story. They turned their lists of attributes into descriptive paragraphs, and we had lots of fun today sharing these new characters with the class.
We have had to stretch out our timetable for our current spelling list due to all our absences, but we hope that we will all be ready for the final test on these 21 words next week on Wednesday. All students should have their master lists in their take home folders, and these words need some time and attention before next Wednesday! Thanks for helping by giving some practice quizzing.
I wish all of you good health in the coming days as we are hopefully moving out of the worst of this flu season. Maybe an extra day's rest on Monday for many is well timed to get over coughs and headaches, etc. Sincerely, Melanie Hannam
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