Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday!!! Tomorrow is Friday!! It is also our first Spirit Day!  We are celebrating the CyHawk game!!  We are slowly adjusting to 4th grade routines.  We have been working on getting the kids logged in to computers.  We had the chromebooks in our room yesterday and will hopefully get them back in today or tomorrow so that they learn to log in and get where they need to be quickly.  It is a slow process but once they figure it out it will go smoothly.  I look forward to that.  The only thing that stresses me out in the classroom is bringing in the new technology.  Soon we will be working on them like professionals!

Language Arts -  This week we read a biography called My Brother Martin.  It is about Martin Luther King Jr and his childhood.  It tells us what happened in his life to inspire him to do the great things he did.  It is a very interesting story.  We have worked on sentences and the 4 kinds of sentences.  We studied the names of the sentences and their ending punctuation.  We reviewed what contractions are and how they work.  We also talked about Idioms.  Ask your child to tell you what an Idiom is.  We had fun with this topic.  Spelling words this week are on the Short e and long e vowel sounds.  I do not send a list home at the beginning of the week.  Your child will do a worksheet on Tuesday and Thursday over spelling words and the list appears on those worksheets. Also on Wednesday they will be practicing their misspelled words 5 times.  They have their spelling notebooks that they took the pretest in they can bring home also, if you want to see the list.  Tomorrow students will take their spelling posttest and end of the week assessment. Please be sure they are studying their spelling words and vocab words tonight.  This week's vocab words can be found in their language arts notebook.

Math -  This week we continue to work on place value.  We have talked about the 3 ways to write numbers: Standard Form, Written Form and Expanded Form.  We also worked on comparing numbers using <,>, = symbols and them to greatest or vice versa.  So far they are doing a great job.  We also started STMath.  This is on the computers.  We finished logging in and getting started.  They are very excited!

Social Studies-  We are focusing on the whole United States right now.  We have talked about where the hottest and coldest temperatures in the U.S. are and the highest and lowest landforms in the U.S.  We compared the temperatures in the hottest/coldest place to what it was in Creston today.  We will do that a couple times a week just for fun. We have moved into lesson 2 which is on Climate.  Here we talk about what climate is like in the regions but I am also sharing what is was like when I was a kid versus how it is today. 

Spirit Day -  Tomorrow is Spirit Day, our student can choose to wear sweatpants on this day.  Not sure many will pay the $1.00 to day that since it's so warm, but teachers will definitely pay to wear jeans and an Iowa/Iowa State Shirt.   Yes, I will be supporting my Iowa State Cyclones!  

                                I hope all of you have a great weekend!! 

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels