Happy Thursday! I hope everyone is having a good short week! Short weeks are good and bad for me. Good, because I love the extra day at home, but bad, because it make for more work at school. Again, we are still adjusting to our schedules and routines. The whole month will still be a learning process. Remember we all adjust at a different rate. All the students will get there, I promise. Patience is key. I am very happy at where all of them are right now. Great job 4th graders!!!
Language Arts - This week we are reading a biography on Martin Luther King, Jr called My Brother Martin. It is written by his sister. It shares with us what childhood was like for his family and what events led him to be fight for Civil Rights. The kids seemed to enjoy this story. We have been working on 4 kinds of sentences in grammar. The four are declarative (telling statement), interrogative (asks a question), imperative (a command) and exclamatory ( statement said using strong feeling). They have had this lesson for at least 2 years and I know will have it again next year. I remember learning about this but not till I was a Freshman in High School! I told the kids this to make them feel like they were big stuff! Some of them smiled and sat up a little straighter. The vocabulary strategy we worked on was prefixes ( in, im, il, and ir). We worked with some words that contain these prefixes and discussed how it changes the meaning of the word. The target skill this week is Author's Purpose. We talked a lot about those purposes. Ask your child if they can tell you why author's write things. Remember tomorrow is our spelling post test and end of week test.
Math - This chapter in math is all about place value. This chapter should be a bit of a review. Only thing new is I teach them place value up to the hundred millions. The first two lessons are talking about place value, what a period is in math, the value of digits in a number, reading numbers correctly, and the three ways which we can write numbers. Those three ways are standard form, word form, and expanded form. This is a lot of information in 2 lessons. We will finish the week with three forms of writing numbers. It's a little amazing how much information is in these two lessons and how long it takes us to get through them. I want you to know I am a teacher that won't leave a lesson unless I feel like everyone is really understanding the concept. Sometimes we spend a short time on certain lessons and sometimes we spend a long time. Just depends on the group of kids and how well they learn new concepts. Each thing we learn is important to something else we will learn down the road so we can't skip things or move on because we are frustrated.
Social Studies - We learned how to do vocabulary words this week. I do vocabulary several different ways. We may make flash cards one week. we may just put them in our notebooks with definitions one week or we may work with them in something similar to a Frayer Model. This is where they define the word, put it in a sentence, give me an example and a non-example of the word. This one is harder but you also learn a lot more about the word because you have had to dig deeper with its meaning. This is on strategy I am working on with them for this chapter. We are also working hard on cooperative learning where the students are more engaged with one another then with just me. I am doing this in all classes but this one is the one I do it in the most this time of year. They learn to work together and learn from each other more than just listening to me. It also allows them more time to share out their ideas and thoughts with each other.
I hope all of you are signing up for my Facebook page. Remember it is called St. Malachy Fantastic Fourth Grade. I just accepted some people on there today. Please sign up so you can see any photos I post about things going on in our classroom. I also want to say thank you for sharing your precious child with me this year. I am all ready enjoying all of the students. I appreciate you putting your trust in me to care for them each day. Tomorrow is Spirit day! We combine this with CyHawk Day! Wear your favorite Iowa team tomorrow. Can't wait to take pics of us supporting our favorite team.
GO CYCLONES!!!
God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels
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