Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday!!  I feel like this has been a short week also with our field trip mixed into the week.  We are headed to the end of the road.  Only like 23 days left of school.  Lots of things start happening for your students.  Thank goodness dance is over, but softball/baseball, soccer and other things begin to kick into high gear.  Please remind your students school comes first.  We still need to be getting our work done for school even though we are busy at night or it is just too nice to be inside.  I feel I have given a lot of late slips out recently.  We are almost done but not quite.  I will be sad to see your kids go, I have have really enjoyed them this year!

Language Arts -  This week we read a story called Owen & Mzee.  It is a story about a very odd friendship.  The friendship is between a very old Aldabra turtle and a baby hippopotamus. It is a very good story about rescue and adaptation. The Hippo is stranded alone after a Tsunami destroys his pod.  They rescue him and take him to a shelter area and put him in with Mzee the turtle.  They become fast friends.  It is really a sweet story.  We have worked on the suffixes -ly and -ed.  We worked on comma rules in grammar.  We looked at words in a series, city and state, date and year, and speaking directly to someone.  These are good reminders because 4th graders struggle with most of these when writing.  Tomorrow is test day!  Be sure to study your spelling words and vocabulary words.

Math -  We have been so busy working on BizTown Math that we walked away from division for a while.  I reviewed division with them today and many have forgotten how to do it. Tomorrow I plan to reteach division to them and have them work on some more problems.  They have 4-5 problems to do for homework today.  Most are finished.  We are near the end of our chapter so we will finish it and take a test.  After this chapter we are going to go into fractions.  We will discuss what fractions are and what they look like.  A lot of them are all ready working on fractions in ST Math.  Some of the activities they are doing in ST Math are very challenging.  It is great to see them work with a group of kids who try to problem solve together to get their answers.  I even find some of the levels very challenging. 

Social Studies -  We have finished our interactive notebook for the Southeast region and will begin work on the MIdwest states.  We are going to start reading the really important facts about each region so we can move forward.  I told the kids there wouldn't be any more tests over chapters but we would do tests over the maps to get them ready for the end of the year test.  Next week we will take a test over just locating the Southeast states and listing the capitals with it.  Again the next region will be the Midwest.  We will learn important facts about this region and work on locating them on map. We will also continue to put the states in our interactive notebooks. 

BizTown -  We had a lot of fun on this field trip. Thank you for all the volunteers that went with us.  Your child worked very hard all day and made comments about all the things they needed to accomplish is such a small amount of time.  Our day is shorter than those kids in Des Moines because we have that hour drive time.  We will work on trying to extend our day a little the next time we go.  This year I worked in the bookstore.  It was a lot of work because it was to have 4 employees and only had 2.  We had a ton of stuff to do. It was great to only have St. Malachy students and not another school with us.  I feel our kids benefited greatly from that. I tried to explain to the kids we were doing 8 hours of work on a 3 1/2 hours.  We are very fortunate to have this activity.  Such great life lessons here and we are covering financial literacy!

I hope all of you have a great weekend!  I will be gone Monday afternoon.  I am going to Dr. with one of my daughters to see about a cyst in her wrist.  Hopefully they will just drain it right there in the office, otherwise we will be scheduling surgery.  Pray for a simple fix!

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels