Happy Thursday!! I hope all of you enjoyed your break!! I definitely did. D.C. and New York were very interesting. I highly recommend this trip to all of you when your child is a Junior or Senior. I will share just a few pictures now and then each week maybe a few more. I took 529 photos total. I have shared them with the 4th grade. They seemed very interested and asked a lot of questions.
Language Arts - We are reading a story called The Ever-Living Tree this week. This is an informational story about the Sequoia trees in California. The story wants to put into perspective just how old these trees really are. They connect it by talking about events in history and what the tree was doing during those events. A time line appears at the top of the page to show it's life span also. Not a story the students are really interested in reading about. We will work on some punctuation in grammar. Sentence ending punctuation and quotation marks. The strategy we are working on this week is text/graphic sources. That is any pictures, graphs, charts, maps, or italicized words in the story. We are looking at them and deciding what is their purpose. Why are they important to the story and how do they aid in our understanding of the story. We worked on this skill in the small groups and also with the main story. I hope this leads the students to pay attention to these things in other books or stories that they read.
Math - This week in Math we are starting to talk about division strategies. We are starting with strategies that will lead us up to the standard algorithm that you were taught. These beginning strategies help students to better understand why the algorithm works. Growing up I never understood why things worked or how they worked but I knew how to just follow the process that was given to me. These earlier strategies help give the students reasons why we can do what we do. They are not just following a process, they have reasoning behind it. This will make them better students and understand math a whole lot better. Maybe we don't see the benefits now, but I can guarantee you that in the future when taking algebra, geometry, calculus and other courses. It will be very beneficial. Our children are learning so much more at a younger age, they are more advanced then us. We are taking it easy as to not to frustrate anyone. These lessons are simple and each one builds upon the one before. We will be masters at division by the time we are done. It excites me to see the understanding is coming quicker than I anticipated too. They are doing GREAT!!
Social Studies- We started this week by choosing our projects for the Midwest Region. Your child should have their due date page with project and state written on it. It will be due in about 3 weeks. I will immediately assign the next region so we get all 4 projects in by the end of year. This week we have learned about waterways in the Midwest focusing on the Great Lakes Region. They also learned what a lock is and how it works. We are now beginning to discuss the Badlands. I highly recommend a family trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota if you are wondering what to do for a vacation. It has a lot of great things to see. As you get to the Wall, South Dakota area you can take a drive through the Badlands. It is very interesting. I went as a 3rd or 4th grader and still remember our visit there.
I hope everyone has a very enjoyable weekend!!! Enjoy the temperature on Sunday!!
God Bless,
Mrs.Sickels
 |
| Statue of Liberty |
 |
| Lincoln Memorial |
No comments:
Post a Comment