Happy Thursday!! Wow, time seams to fly in 4th grade. I feel like I just wrote a parent letter!! We are working very hard. The weather seems to by turning cooler, which is to be expected. This is the last month for the students to wear shorts. On November 1st, we are no longer able to wear shorts. Please refer to the handbook and look back over the dress code. I love the sunshine today. Conferences are coming. I hope all of you are following your child's progress online. I am entering test scores and homework assignments on there so you can keep up with how your child is doing. If you are unable to get online please contact Sarah in the office and she will help you.
Math - I am very excited about Math this week. I have begun teaching partial product which to me is the best way to do a multiplication problem because you walk through every step and you understand exactly what you are doing. This made multiplication make better sense to me as an adult. I learned this strategy about 8 years ago and have been teaching it ever since. Please, take the time to learn the strategy from your child. It incorporates the distributive property into it and uses expanded form which we learned in chapter 1. I also like to to show them how what we learn carries over into other things. It would be of great help if you worked on some basic facts at home with your child. Do flashcards or find an online game or program that works on memorizing those basic facts. Math would be easier for them if they were able to multiply basic facts quickly.
Social Studies - We are moving through lesson 3 rather quickly. Before long we will move into chapter 4 which begins our learning on each region of the United States. We will focus on only those states within that regions. We will learn about the people who once lived there, resources that are found there and what they have to offer the rest of the United States. We will also begin focusing on the map of the United States and practice placing the states in their proper places. We will do a region at a time. My intent is that they master the region before we move on and add more states. By the end of the year, they should be able to do all 50 states. This is also something that can be reinforced at home with a map, a game, or computer game. We have sequence United States at our house. It helps to familiarize them with the shape of the states. These are all fun ways to learn.
Language Arts - This week we are reading a story called "Coming Distractions". It is informational text on movie making. I am not sure the students were very interested in this story. I tried to do a lot of discussing to pull some interest out of them. I related to movies that I know they watch. We are working on verb tenses in grammar. There are three verb tenses: past, present, and future. They have bee doing some worksheets showing their understanding of these. We worked on a reading strategy summarizing this week. I found a great sheet called FAB 5 for summarizing. It is an easy way to summarize a fictional story. We completed an activity on summarizing where they had to use the FAB 5 to give me a summary of a very short story. We found out not all aspects of the 5 are necessarily used in every story. They wrote a few summaries for me. We also discussed that this strategy would not lend itself to the information text stories full of facts. Remember to study spelling words and vocabulary tonight for the assessment tomorrow.
Book Orders were placed today!! Thank you very much for the orders!!!
I hope all of you have a great weekend! Mine is not as busy as last weekend but I do have a Molly playing volleyball on Saturday and Jami playing in Winterset on Saturday. Wish I could be two places at once!! Where is the Harry Potter time turner when you need it!! Sorry, if you are not a Harry Potter fan you won't know what I am saying. It does make it so someone can be two places at once.
God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels
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