Hope everyone has a GREAT Labor Day Weekend, remember, no school on Monday.

**Math Please remind your child that name, date and # needs to be on everything they turn in. Also, answers on math tests need to be circled, and "Word" problems need to be answered with "words". I will start taking off points for these things this week. Also, the morning math we do each day has problems with stars next to them. We thoroughly go over these together in class. Unless your child is absent, these problems should not be wrong. I also stress to them, that it is not ok to just write in the correct answer if they got it wrong, they need to show a strategy that we went over together. And last but not least, our numbers will quickly get bigger this year, we need to use commas in all numbers over 999. Thanks for your help with these things.

**Content: Content is either Science and/or Social Studies. Report cards will have a grade in either Science OR Social Studies each 9 weeks, not both. Some weeks we will be working in one subject or the other, and some weeks they will be integrated, for example next week we will be integrating our study of Alabama and its regions with animals. We will start getting a weekly newspaper, called Social Studies Weekly that will have lots of information about Alabama. The hard copies will stay at school and be part of our Content Interactive Notebook. But this newspaper is also online for you and/or your child to look at from home at any time. It's a great resource and also includes videos, pictures and even reads the articles aloud to the kids. We have not logged in from school yet, but for your info. the username is the 196 number and password is 123456.

**Famous Sayings: The kids wrote their own famous sayings today during writing, get your child to show them to you from their Google Drives. :)

**Online Quizzes: We take at least 2 or 3 online quizzes a week. For example last week we learned about types of sentences, then the kids watched a Brainpop video to review, and then took a quiz on Brainpop. We took a quiz on 3's, 4's, and 5's multiplication tables today and didn't get a chance to go down and print. These will not always go home unless it is a low grade and then I will let you know. If at any time you would like to know what online quizzes have been taken I will be glad to email you and let you know. The results for many of these can be seen online, for example some of our most used, Spelling City, Pearson Success Net (Math), Social Studies Weekly (Content) and coming soon, Scholastic Story Works (Reading). You can log onto your child's account at any time and see what quizzes they have taken, what they missed, etc.

**Treasure Box One man's trash....! If you have any small toys at home that 4th graders would like, bag them up, and send them to our classroom!! One of our rewards on Reading Rewards is a trip to the treasure box, so now is the time to clean out those closets!

Repeating in case you missed it last time:

**Spelling City**--Should be underway! Let me know if you have questions.

**Reading Rewards**  Each night Monday through Thursday students will be expected to read for at least 20 minutes log and comment on the site.  I would love for them to read Friday through Sunday, however I will not expect them to report to me.  I will only check the site.  

**Math Math sheet(s) will be come home each Monday and will be turned in to me on Friday and usually it will have pages from our workbook stapled to it.  Students are definitely encouraged to solve the work on their own and then have a parent or grown up check for accuracy.  We rotate weeks: Language (parts of speech) and Vocabulary one week, and Spelling and DOL the next week.  Never will students be tested in Vocabulary and Spelling or DOL and Language in the same week. Spelling City will be due every Friday, and flash cards and sentences will be due on vocabulary weeks.  Starting Sept. 1st, you can begin initialing each night on the "year" calendar to say that you have seen and checked homework.

**Graded Papers**-will come home every other week in yellow SSC Wednesday Folder.  Please look over and initial EACH graded paper with your child and allow them time to make corrections IN PEN.  There will also be a parent signature form that you can then initial letting me know you both have had time to work together on this.  I would like to have these returned by Thursday, however if you need an extra day then just send a note or email to me letting me know. If you write notes besides in the comment section, make sure it is on the first graded paper because I do not flip back through them.

We are working on a new strategy for solving word problems that will come in VERY handy when we study fractions. You will see 2 examples in this week's signed papers. Right now it seems simple to them and some are skipping underlining important info and drawing the model. Please help me stress that they need to do this. Also, if it's not a matter of being lazy and your child just needs extra practice, here is a great website to do that. They have already used it in class, so they should know how it works. We are just doing addition and subtraction now, but there is also practice for multiplication and division when we get to it.

**Book Orders**
A separate email went out about Scholastic.