Happy Thursday!! It is very happy because we have had a full week of school! This of course makes me happy but not so much the kids! We have been busy this week. The kids have worked hard! I am super proud of the way they have come back and worked. We will continue to work hard through Spring Break! We only have like 11 days until then. I have not pointed that out to the kids. I am afraid they will go on break early.
Book It - The February Calendars are due by Monday, March 5th to receive a pizza certificate. We are ready for our last month of keeping track. March is the last one with a goal of 600 minutes!
Conferences - It is that time of year again and they are fast approaching! Here is the link to my sign up. Please be sure you get your name on a time you want. I have a couple times on Tuesday after school I am doing. I am gone Monday at a track meet in Ames for Molly and Wednesday I have my own high school conference, so Tuesday was my only extra day. So go check it out.
http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0544a5a72ca1fe3-4thgrade4
Language Arts - This week we are finishing up what we started last Monday. We are reading Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez. It tells us the story of how migrant workers living conditions and pay were pretty poor. Cesar Chavez decided he wanted change and marched from Delano, California to Sacramento. He started with 67 followers and not very popular but then at the end he had 10,000 followers and also created a Migrant Workers Union. He also got a contract for them to work for better pay and better conditions. The kids found this story interesting. I had one student who watched a show on TV about Cesar on Wednesday night. This topic also appeared in our read aloud book this week! Such great timing for it all! We are talking about some pretty heavy content in grammar. Independent and dependent clauses and focusing on the relative pronouns and adverbs they start with. This is some pretty complicated content and we only spend about 3 days on it. We did 2 of the 3 worksheets together and was able to discuss each one. The worksheets are harder than what the students will do on the assessment. I assured them they would do great! Our vocabulary strategy this week was on reference materials. The focus was no learning to look up a word in the dictionary and also understand all that a dictionary entry provides to the student. It tells what part of speech the word is, gives the definition(s) of the word, may tell synonyms or antonyms, how to pronounce the word and what part of the word is stressed! That is a lot of stuff. Yes, I made them use actual dictionaries and not a digital dictionary. From what I have seen the actual book has more information than what the internet provides. Tomorrow will be our normal Friday with a spelling post test and end of week assessment over the story.
Math - We have completed what I need to teach in Chapter 13. It consisted of 3 lessons. Learning Perimeter and Area and then area of combined rectangles. We have spent the last two days reviewing perimeter and area. Today we will do a review then I plan to have them test over this tomorrow. I will write the formulas for perimeter and area on the board so they can refer to it when doing their test. There will not be as many questions on the test since we didn't cover all the lessons. We also did not take a pretest over this material.
Social Studies - They are moving through lesson one in Chapter 7. They are learning about the Cherokee Native Americans right now. Today they learned about Sequoyah, the Native American that wrote an alphabet for their language. This made the Cherokee learn to read and write. They were the only Native American group to have their own alphabet. We will finish this lesson tomorrow and they will do the worksheet that covers the information. We will start the week next week with putting a state in their notebooks. We are moving through this quite well. I hope to finish up the Southeast before Spring Break so we can hit the Midwest as soon as we come back. We have 3 more regions to go. We are picking up the pace a little bit.
Auction - The auction is this Saturday night!! We ended up getting more donations this week! Thank you so much. The 3-5 Garden Basket is looking fabulous! Lots of great items in it! Also our silent auction item turned out great. I love it. Lots of silent auction items this year were pictures of students, their hands, crosses, ect. They are a lot of fun!
Dress Code - Yes, it is March and the dress code now allows shorts. Please please keep in mind just because they can doesn't mean they should. We still go outside so wearing shorts in 40 degree weather is not a good idea. They will be awful cold outside. I tell my students this exact thing. If it is going to be 60 great but it is just not necessary to do when it's 40 just because you can. Save that for home on the weekends.
I will not be attending the auction this year. I have only missed like 3 in my 20 years. All had to do with my kids. This weekend in Mom's weekend for Jami's sorority and Mom's Day for Josie's. I will spend the weekend at Jami's but go to Josie's for like 2 hours on Saturday. Best part is Josie does get to participate in Jami's house activities. I think Saturday we are going to the Blank Park Zoo. We have lunch catered by Hickory Park (my fav) and Saturday night the Cyclone Theater is showing "The Greatest Showman" which I have seen twice but love and can't wait to see it again!
I hope everyone has a great weekend!
God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels
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