Classroom Happenings-10-29-13

 Reading-We are getting close to the end of our read aloud City of Ember! We have really enjoyed reading this class book together, ask your child to tell you about it. We should be able to watch the movie this Friday! Writing-This week in writing we have been working on a piece about our Explorer that we are going to use to create an online Voki. We read mentor texts like Diary of a Worm and Atlantic  to help us use creative strategies in our own writing of our Explorer.  Math-We are beginning a unit called How Many Packages? How Many Groups? I will send an email out with more information about this math unit.   Content-We are finishing up our study of Explorers and about to begin studying about the colonization of our country!

A message from the office:

SSC Family,  

The 5x7 classroom group and 4^th grade level pictures are in! You may drop by the front office if you would like to take a look at the pictures before buying. The pictures are only $7.00 each. Online payment is preferred at www.myschoolfees.com in which you will be able to print confirmation of payment. Otherwise, send cash or check payment in an envelope to the school. Please make checks payable to South Shades Crest School. As a fundraiser for our school, SSC receives 100% of sales!!

Thank you for supporting our school with this memorable fundraiser. If you have any questions, please call the school office at 439-3000.

 *Check our calendar for other important dates.

4th Grade Teachers on Literacy Day

October 14

Book Fair this week! Our class will go each day from 1-1:30. We filled out wish lists that should have come home on Friday. October 15th from 5-7 p.m. is a time for kids and parents to come and enjoy the book fair. Check out our class wish list box, the kids picked out a few books that our class would love to have!

Reading-We are finishing our study of Questioning in Narrative Non-Fiction and will begin working on Analyzing Text Structure in Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction. We will be exploring text features such as character, setting, plot and conflict and we will continue questioning to help make sense of text. Check Reading Rewards to make sure the kids are sticking to a book each night and writing reviews at the end of each book finished. Not only the kids in our room, but kids everywhere get good ideas for books to read from our reviews!  Writing-We have been working on collecting ideas for writing in our binders and adding detail to our writing pieces. Sticking to a topic will continue to be a focus. We will also begin writing Personal Narratives and work on skills like keeping in important parts of the story and taking unimportant parts out, showing the passage of time with our words and showing why characters do what they do. To add to our ideas for writing, we will begin collecting memories to put into our writing notebook. We will explore different ways to write about these memories. Please help the kids remember to bring in memories. They will be glued into a book so if you do not want to part with original pictures, just print a copy and send that in. No bigger than about a 4x6. Math-We have officially started multiplying and dividing with bigger numbers, at first a few of us were a little stressed but we are quickly becoming comfortable with the process. I sent videos home with our beginning strategies so check old emails if you have not seen them.  Content-Our first report card will not have a Social Studies grade because we have only been studying science this first nine weeks. For a deeper understanding and to keep the flow, we will be studying Social Studies for the next two 9 weeks. During this time we will cover the time period starting with the European Explorers and going through the birth of our nation, The American Revolution and the formation of our government. Then, the last nine weeks, we will return to studying Science.

September 30

Fall is in the air and things are beginning to cool off a bit!

Here is what's going on in class: Reading-We are finishing up our study of the elements of non-fiction. We are using a site called Razz Kids that has leveled books so that each child is reading books that are just right! We use this site on Mondays during "nook time" and should be reading and taking quizzes on at least 2 books a week. You can log into your child's account and sign up for a parent account if you would like to keep track of how your child is doing. Our read aloud is Flying Solo by Ralph Fletcher, the kids are enjoying debating what they would do if I was absent and the sub did not show up! On Tuesdays during read aloud, the kids can log in to Reading Rewards and use the blog feature as a sort of "back channel" to discuss the book as I am reading it.  Writing-This week we are publishing our non-fiction "how to" books. We have read a few mentor texts to help us make our non-fiction books more exciting. Ask your child about the book How to Lay an Egg! Spelling  This week the children have different spelling lists according to how they did on the practice test today. Please remind them to do all of their Spelling City activities for homework except the test. We will do that on Friday in class. Math-We are busy collecting and analyzing data. Let your child tell you about the data we collected on the heights of fourth and first graders. They can tell you about the range of heights for both grades, the average height of a fourth and first grader, an estimate of how much taller a fourth grader is than a first grader and how to use a line plot graph to better display our data. Now we are working in small groups to come up with a question to collect more data to compare. Continue to have your child work on multiplication fluency, division is coming soon!  Content-We have started our study of electricity by learning about how to be safe with electricity. Next we learned about magnets and static electricity. By the end of this week we will be learning all about circuits and how electricity travels by trying to light a light bulb, we will also discover what conductors and insulators are and how they effect circuits!

The kids should now be using the app Assignment Nook to write their homework and they should be giving you their calendars to initial each night to show that you have seen their homework. You can always see our class homework blog here if you need to.

 *Check our calendar for important dates. Have a great week!

September 16

Wow our school We raised over 55,000 pennies for a total of$608.00 today! Don't forget to send in nickels (or pennies) tomorrow!!

Open House is tomorrow night at 6:30, I hope to see you there!

Again, we had a wonderful time on our field trip! I was really proud of our children. If you did not receive text updates on your phone during the day of our trip, then make sure and sign up for our class updates here.

 Just a little bit about what is going on in class: Reading-We are learning about the types and features of non-fiction. We are also learning how t quickly find information and better understand information when we are reading non-fiction. Writing-We have packed our journals with ideas for writing Now, to go along with our reading non-fiction unit, we are writing "How To"  books. We began by exploring "How To" books and noticing what other authors included in their "How To" books. We decided that these types of books could get boring so we read a mentor text book called How To Lay an Egg to help us with using our voices and some authors craft to make our books more exciting. We will be publishing our books soon. In Grammar we will be focusing on nouns and pronouns this week.  Math- We are still in our first unit. This week we are focusing on the multiples of 100 and their factors. You will see examples of this in our homework this week. Don't forget the Math Student Handbook I sent home, it will help you help your child with any of these homework pages. Some of the kids are still not fluent with their multiplication facts 1-12. This is imperative to be successful with harder multiplication problems and division this year! There are some links below to help your child practice their facts. Content-We are finishing up our study of Space this week. We have learned about the differences of comets, meteors, meteorites, meteoroids, and asteroids today and we will finish the week learning about moon phases and stars with a culminating test this Friday. Your child should have a study guide with answers.  Technology-We have been very busy in technology! The kids are using Spelling City practice their spelling words, blogs for, well...blogging...Razz kids to keep their reading skills sharp, TenMarks for working on math and we log our reading on Reading Rewards. We are using lots of other sites too. Ask your children to show you the sites they are working on, many of them have parent codes that you will see from your child's account. Here are some video tutorials that will help you use some of these sites. Remember to keep talking about online safety and have clear rules for your child using technology at home.

Sites to check out!
*Check our calendar for important dates.
Favorite Links-for just about anything your child needs to work on or learn about in 4th grade!
Lab Lessons-This is the link we go to during our computer lab, remind your child to check here and make sure their lab assignments were completed each week.
Nouns and Pronouns practice
Multiplication Practice!!

• Self Correcting Quizzes-up through a fact or just one table
• Practice a Multiplication table on Math Magician
• Lots of Multiplication sites

Solar System

September 3rd

I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day weekend! This week will be a busy week! Just a few things I want to let you know. Our first field trip to the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center is coming up quickly! Forms and information are going home today. The due date is not until early next week, but please go ahead and send everything back in as soon as possible!

I am also sending home a math resource book for parents. It will have your child's number on it and is due back at the end of the school year. If you will notice on page 14 of this week's homework, there is a resource page number at the top right of the page. That page number is a resource page for you in the book I am sending home tonight. Each week the kids will have similar homework pages that will have resource pages for you in the Student Math Handbook.

This is our first week of spelling. We will all have the same list this week as we get used to the format. The next time that we have spelling, the lists will be different according to how your child does on the pre-test. More information about this is in the Parent Night notes on our web site.

Also, the kids have an Edmodo Scavenger Hunt that is due Friday. You can access the scavenger hunt from our homework blog post from today. It is very important that they know how to use Edmodo correctly as they will be using this program through high school in Hoover. Please help them especially with step 6 so they will know how you want them to download items at home. Our scavenger hunt is due Friday.

We are researching the planets in class this week and we will make and share a project (in class) about our planet!  :)

Have a great, short week!

August 24

What a great start to school 4th graders have had! This blog is a place where I will post our classroom happenings. The first week we spent reviewing, learning about our classroom, and getting to know each other. We will start out learning about space in science and going to the  Space and Rocket Center for our first field trip!  In math we will begin by making sure we have all of our multiplication facts 0-12 fluent and memorized! We will review multiplication concepts in our first Investigations unit and sharpen up our computation skills. 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 and Thank You Mr. Falker. Now, we are about to begin our first read aloud, The Hundred Dresses. 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'm looking forward to seeing you all Thursday, August 29th for our parent meeting. Please bring your smart phone, tablet, or good old fashioned pen and paper.