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