May the "fourth" be with you! Fun times in Fourth grade!

May the "fourth" be with you! Fun times in Fourth grade!
Mrs. Constantine's Class Rocks!!

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

First Week

Welcome Parents!

This is the site where I will send home e-news. On the right hand side of this page you can follow by email and subscribe to the posts.

It's been rainy so we have not had a chance to make our whole class picture, so the picture at the top of this blog will change as soon as we get the chance to go outside.
The kids and I had a great start to school! Thank you so much for having them so prepared in every way. We have a great group of kids in our class. Thursday and Friday we spent reviewing school and class rules, learning about our classroom, and getting to know each other.  This week we will continue to get to know each other. In math we will begin by making sure we have all of our multiplication facts 0-12 fluent and memorized! In addition to that, we will review computation skills and begin a unit on data and analysis. I will also be doing beginning of the year reading and math assessments with each child. As writers we will begin collecting ideas for stories  We will also begin to write personal narratives and study how to “zoom in” on the most important parts so it will sound like a story and not just a retelling. We read and enjoyed lots of picture books the first week of school, like, First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg and we read Thank you Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco. We are beginning our first longer read aloud, The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes . As we discuss the book, it will encourage us to empathize with others and to treat them how we would like to be treated. We will also begin by talking about mental images and making connections to our reading in order to better understand our books.

I hope you have had a chance to look through your child's TEAM Binder, if not, please take the opportunity tonight. Behind the important info tab will be things that need to stay in the binder all year like: our class directory, usernames and passwords for sites we use and TEAM book rules. Starting September 1, please initial the "calendar" each night to say that you have seen the online calendar, where your child posts homework, and looked over homework when they are finished. Our homework, will also be posted on our Homework Blog. This site also has links to other sites we use. We will be doing spelling and vocabulary practice online on a site called Spelling City, if your child does not have access form home, please see this link for the paper homework your child can do for spelling instead instead. We will also use a great site called Reading Rewards to log our reading each night, comment about what we are reading, look for good books and many other things. We can discuss this more at Parent Night.

Tonia Ballintine, Luke's mom, has volunteered to be our room mom! Everyone please give her a big hug when you see her! I am very excited to see all of the parents that will be able to help this year and give Tonia lots of support! There are also extra spaces on the room parent volunteer form to sign up. If you would like to, Tonia welcomes the support!

We will be using lots of great web sites this year.  Please bookmark our CLASS WEB SITE on your own home computers, smart phones, etc. for reference. The navigation bar at the top of this page will have other important links for you.

If you have not, please go to our Welcome Page, follow directions to send a message to Remind, for emergency texts from me, and fill out the 3 forms on this page. Only fill out the Student Directory if you want your child to be included in a directory that I will send to everyone. Last day to be included in the directory will be this Thursday, August 20.

I'm looking forward to seeing you all Tuesday, August 25th at 6:30 p.m. for our parent meeting. Please bring your smart phone, tablet, or good old fashioned pen and paper.

Students may start bringing Chrome Books to school every day if they have not already. If your child does not have a Chrome Book yet, please go ahead and fill out the acceptable use forms as we will begin doing some homework on Chrome Books next week. Also, echo my discussion with your children that when they bring it to school, school rules apply to sites they can go on, times they can use devices, etc. Also, remind your child that when not in use, they should be in desks, and go from desks to backpacks at pack up time so we don't lose them. They also need to have an 80% charge or higher each day when they get to school.


Snacks
We still have snacks in 4th grade. The kids may bring a healthy snack each day. Please send only the following for snack, any other food will need to be eaten at lunch time: fresh fruit or vegetables(no fruit roll ups, fruit in a can, or yogurt), healthy crackers plain popped popcorn, pretzels, cheese, baked chips. You are welcome to send extra snacks for our “extra snack” drawer. They may also bring a disposable water bottle to school each day, if they bring a non disposable, it needs to go home each night to be washed.

Have a great weekend and looking forward to seeing everyone next Tuesday!