Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday!! I hope everyone is having a good week.  Things are moving along very well in 4th grade.  They are working hard on completing their homework in the time that is given to them.  The homework has calmed down because things are becoming more routine and subjects are stretching out.  I am trying some new things in the classroom this week.  I am anxious to see some end results of the changes.  Please, keep encouraging your child to complete work and help me to be excited when they come home with no homework.

Language Arts - This week the student's read a play called The Power of W.O.W.!  It is a story about a minibus that is a library that travels outside the city. It is called Words on Wheels (W.O.W.)  It was a pilot program that  lost it's funding.  The kids who benefit from the W.O.W are sad and want to do something to try and save it.  They have a car wash to raise money.  A news reporter catches wind of it and does a report on it.  The kids are swamped at car wash and people start just donating money.  They are able to save W.O.W. for a long time.  It is a great story about hard work paying off.  We are discussing sentence fragments and run-on sentences this week.  In spelling the list covered long O and short O.  Small groups worked on the "theme" of some short stories, vocab, and whether groups of words were a complete sentence or a fragment.  Remember end of week test is tomorrow!! Study the spelling and vocab for tomorrow.

Math - We worked on rounding numbers again this week.   We also moved on to renaming numbers. We are learning other ways to say numbers or to represent numbers.  They learned why when we talk about years we say 18 hundreds (1800"s) instead of 1,800.  We also learned that 560 is 56 tens instead of 560.  We drew pictures to represent these numbers also.  We spent a couple days on it.  During center time, we worked on rounding and renaming numbers.  We will next move onto adding whole numbers.  We will be adding large numbers and reviewing the regrouping process.

Social Studies - We are starting chapter 2.  This chapter will cover government and economics of our country.  I am trying a new model called the Frayer model with vocabulary words. I have chosen 12 words out of the 20 that they will apply this model to and have group discussions.  They will be doing more than memorizing the words.  This requires them to actually understand the meaning of the words and be able to show me they know it.  The group discussions will help them to share what they know and for someone who struggled with a word, they will have better learning experience because they are listening to their peers conversations.  We had first group discussion today on first 2 words and I like it!! I will wait to see if the end result and then apply this same strategy to our language arts words.

Hello!

We are in need of parents and students of St. Malachy School to ride on our float this Friday.  Please let your child’s teacher know if you and your child are willing to ride.  We are waiting for information from the High School about the location of our float.  We will meet at 1:45 at the location.  Please watch for the location in the Thursday newsletter on our website http://www.crestonstmalachy.org/   Following the parade we will unload at the Holy Spirit Church Parking lot.  It is very important that all children are picked up and not left unattended.  If you are willing to stay with students until all students are picked up please let your child’s teacher know that as well.

Thank you for your continued support of St. Malachy School Activities,

Jennifer Simmons

Principal

I hope all of you have a great weekend.  Enjoy the weather.  

God Bless, 
Mrs. Sickels

Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday!!!  This has been a busy week.  I went to the Civic Center last night to see Dirty Dancing and it was FABULOUS!!!  It was a very late night though.  I am yawning today.  Tonight I am off to Denison for volleyball.  I am ready for this week to be over!  The week has been much better homework wise.  They are working very hard.  I have a "study group" that takes their work to the neighboring room and works.  They are monitored by the Ms. Thomas, our aide.  They enjoy this time and accomplish a lot.  Things are gradually becoming more routine.  Those first 3-4 weeks can be stressful for everyone.  

Language Arts -  This week we read a story called "My Librarian Is A Camel".  It is an informational story. I find it very interesting.  It tells us about communities that are far away from a major city or isolated, and how they get to enjoy library books.  In Africa, they are delivered by camel.  In Finland, it's by boat, in Northern Canada it is by the mail.  The kids find the idea interesting but the reading is dry and hard for them to stay focused on.  We will cover this story again tomorrow right before they test over it.  In spelling this week the skill was focusing on long i and short i.  The grammar focus was on quotation marks.  We worked on how to correctly punctuate a quote from someone.  This can be very tricky.  The students seemed to do well. The test will be challenging.  The decoding lesson this week was over VCCV patterns.  You should find the test results of last Friday's end of the week test will be found in today's take home folder.  They are for you, I have the originals here at school.

Math - In math this week, we have been working on comparing and ordering numbers and also rounding numbers.  We are struggling with rounding numbers so we are going to spend some extra time on it.  I am not comfortable leaving this until I know everyone has a handle on it.  We will then have a MId-Chapter checkpoint.  This means we are halfway through the chapter.  We will have 4 more lessons then get ready to assess our knowledge.  I use the MId-Chapter checkpoint to see if there is anything in the first 4 chapters I may need to go back and touch on again with certain students before moving forward.  We have been doing a lot of group work in Math to try and share ideas with each other.  Sometimes other student'st thoughts might trigger something for someone else who wasn't quite getting it.  Today I have a couple games planed for some groups so they hopefully are either practicing their rounding or still working on learning rounding.

Social Studies - We are getting ready for our first test.  They worked on a study guide today.  We will check it tomorrow and they will test on Monday.  Tuesday we will correct the tests and begin the next chapter.  Chapter 2 will talk about our government, and our economic system.  There is a lot to learn in this chapter.  Sometimes it is a hard chapter to teach because there is so much you want the kids to remember.  In all honesty, they probably won't find it interesting.  I will be looking for ways to present it to them that is interesting.  

I hope all of you have a great weekend!! I will spend Saturday in the Red Oak High School gym watching volleyball.  Sunday will be a day to myself!! Woohoo!! I will try to catch up on all the housework, and laundry that I fell behind on during the week.  I am usually checking Friday Language Arts tests also!!  I pray the balloons can go up and I get to see some.  Sometimes on the way to or from Red Oak we see them flying.  I just hope the weather allows them to go up.

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels

Dear Parents,
     Hello and Happy Thursday!!  We are working very hard in 4th grade!!  We are adjusting to using our time wisely at school, and I am learning more about your students.  I know it seems like some days there is more homework than others, but I will tell you that as we really get going this will slow down.  The subjects start spreading themselves out and it doesn't seem like so much.  It is always a struggle at the beginning of the year.  The hardest part for me is making sure every student is working diligently during study hall times.  There are a lot of distractions with 25 kids.  We will continue to work on this.  Hopefully you will see the amount of homework changing.  

Language Arts - This week was a short week which puts a damper on getting everything we normally do completed.  We are reading a story called My Brother Martin.  This is a story about Martin Luther King, Jr. written by his sister.  She is informing us about what childhood was like for M.L.K. and his siblings and how that inspired him to be so passionate about the Civil Rights Movement.  It is quite interesting.  I think students forget that these famous people were also children.  Our spelling list this week was on Long e and short e words.  We looked at the four kinds of sentences for grammar: declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory. They know what the ending punctuation for each would be and should be able to tell you what each sentence is doing.  This week our focus was on Author's Purpose.  We talked about the main 3 reasons that an author writes a story.  They are: to entertain, to inform, and to persuade.  I had different activities for groups to do with this.  One group read a story, looked for details that led them decide what the purpose of the story was.  The other group was given book titles and had to put them in a category of entertain, inform, or persuade.  This is a skill we work on off and on all year.  We will be able to pick these out easily by the end of the year.

Math - We have been working on 3 forms of writing a number this week.  Standard form is the way we see numbers all the time, word form is when we write the number out in words only, and expanded form is when we write the number using the value of each digit.  This lesson is time consuming due to all the writing that we do.  I feel that I had people still not catching onto the expanded form and how to find the value of a digit using place value.  Yesterday we played around with a place value chart and numbers. We made words we discussed their value and then ended with game.  The game was, I roll a die and give them a number.  They had to place it somewhere on the chart then I would give another number.  The goal was to make the biggest number you could BUT you couldn't change a number from a place once it was there.  They had a lot of fun with this. I plan to continue working with place value.

Social Studies - Wow!! These first 3 lessons have a ton of vocab words to work with.  Once we get into the regions there is only 5-6 per lesson which is much better.  We have been talknig about climate and weather.  Today we discussed inset maps.  We talked about what they are and why we use them.  They did some discussion in their groups then as a whole group.  I used both large maps in the room to show inset maps and we discussed why they were there.  All the ones I had were there for different reasons, which was great.  I then had them flip through their books and show me a set of maps with insets maps on them.  It is funny, giving 25 kids permission to flip through their book, was a crazy time!!  I walked around and looked at everyone's pages.  They can easily pick them out but discussing the purpose was little more challenging.

I hope all of you have a great weekend.  Do something fun and exciting.  If you consider a volleyball tournament and then softball tournament fun then I am having a blast!! I do love watching my kids!! Jami does volleyball on Saturday and Josie softball on Sunday. Don't forget the Food Fair on Sunday also!!  I look forward to this day always.

God Bless, 
Mrs. Sickels

Dear Parents,
      Happy Thursday!!!  I hope your student is enjoying 4th grade so far.  I am definitely enjoying the students.  It is quite an adjustment for some, and I have given out some late slips all ready.  The students will get used to having homework and knowing they need to do it.  Parents may need to push them along.  I usually dread the first full week of school but I have really enjoyed this one.  I was ready to come back and get into a routine.  I like to have fun when I teach, and I think the kids are finding that enjoyable.  I hope they enjoy my crazy ways!!!

Language Arts - We are finishing up our week on the story Because of Winn-Dixie.   We have spent time this week focusing on the vocabulary words form the story, decoding words, and picking out subjects and predicates of a sentence.  These are all things that they will be assessed on tomorrow.  It will also assess their comprehension of the story.   Remember there is a spelling post test tomorrow! I have instructed the students to be sure and study for spelling and also study their vocabulary words in their notebooks.  These are items tested over every Friday.  I request they bring their vocabulary notebooks home to study every Thursday night.

Math - We have had one full lesson in Math this week.  It focused on the base ten system and understanding that each place value is 10 times the previous place value.  We looked at base ten blocks up to 1,000 then discussed what they would look like if we had physical example past 1,000.  We will move on to 3 ways to read and write numbers: standard form, word form, expanded form, and comparing numbers next week.  It is always a slow start getting used to my teaching style and how we use our textbooks.  We will move a little faster and we go along. 

Social Studies - We are discussing the 5 regions of the United States.  These regions are: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, and West.  We begin by talking about the United States as a whole and our government system. Then we will move on and study the states by their region.  All 4th graders love social studies because of the content we study and the projects they will complete. This week we have focused on the Regions, their landforms, and the climate of the United States.  The students have had to do a lot of vocabulary words and we do a worksheet at the end of each lesson.  The worksheets help to summarize what they have learned and what is important.

I really hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable Labor Day Weekend.  I know there are lots of fun things that happen this weekend.  I plan to spend some time with family.  I have a cousin who has been training for a triathlon, she had something come up and can't run in the real one, so her husband made one for her around Creston.  Family is gathering to watch her and show support, then having a meal together.  I admire her spirit. I plan to be there. 

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels