Happy New Year to you all! It's been nice to have three days this week to ease back into our routine, and get warmed up again. It felt like we were away longer than two weeks. Everyone in the classroom has been pretty mellow, and all seem happy to be back together again. Our class discussed the fact that we didn't get our classroom Holiday/Winter Party which was to be held the last hour before Break, and we came to an agreement on a new plan. We are going to work toward earning ourselves a special day of favorite activities on the last day of January. We will make a list and a schedule for our day, and successfully following our PBIS good behavior rules will get us what we want to do. We will keep you posted on our progress, and if we might need a little help with a special treat to go along with our possible books and games that day. (By the way, I want to send many thanks to the parents who volunteered and began planning our winter Holiday party. Perhaps we can modify some of those plans for a Valentine's Day party...!)
We have jumped right into where we left off in math class. We are working on rounding off numbers and estimating answers, and next week we move into multi-digit multiplication. If any of our students are still struggling with knowing their basic facts, that will add an extra challenge for them. Ten to fifteen minutes each night practicing facts is still a very good idea!
I am very happy to see that our students continue to be well supplied with good books that they enjoy reading. The Class Reading Log has been passed around all week, getting updated with books read over the break. Next week we are scheduled to take the second round of the MAPS computer testing for Reading and for Math, and we have discussed how we want to see our scores improve over the ones we earned last September. Once we learn our new scores, I want to divide our readers into several "book clubs' where each group will read a common book and meet together to discuss it. I have been collecting multiple copies of appropriately leveled books, and I even read a couple of them over the break, and now I can't wait for our kids to dig into them! This will be lots of fun and will work toward deepening our comprehension skills. By the way, the January Scholastic Book Order Forms came home today, and we have agreed on a due date for orders being Friday, January 11th.
In Writer's Workshop, we were able to wrap up our unit on Essay writing with our last day in December. This week we are organizing all our past rough drafts, story ideas, character sketches, etc. into binders, and next week we will begin a new unit of writing: "Writing Fiction - Big Dreams, Tall Ambitions". This unit builds upon our previous work developing deep and believable characters, realistic settings, and also logical solutions to conflicts that make a story engaging. I am really looking forward to experiencing these lessons with our students.
Social Studies class this week gave us a chance to review our knowledge of glacial landforms, and we are also studying the importance of Wisconsin's waterways. Our state can be divided up into several regions with unique characteristics for each, and next week we will find out about those. For your information, by the end of our second trimester in early March, we want to have covered the early explorers and native people in Wisconsin's history and then study our state's government. Later in February, our three 4th grade classes have made plans to go on a field trip to our Capital building and the Wisconsin Historical Museum! Specific details will come in future newsletters, in case you'd like to join us!
The next two weeks are full 5-day weeks of school, and then we will have two Mondays with no school - the 21st and 28th. Also, beginning on Monday, January 7th and for the rest of the month, we will be welcoming a practicum student from Luther College in Iowa to our classroom. Her name is Colby Engel, her family lives in the Verona area, and she went to Middleton schools, including West Middleton! She will be a teacher in two more years, and being with us will give her more experience in the classroom. We are looking forward to getting to know Ms. Engel.
May you all enjoy a wintery but cozy weekend. Melanie Hannam
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