Happy Thursday! Welcome back from a wonderful Christmas Season. I really enjoyed my break. It was a long one yet when it's over it never feels long enough! I missed all the students and am happy to be back in the classroom with them. They have come back refreshed and ready to work. They seemed to have missed each other's company also. Sounds like they all had a very enjoyable Christmas! Time spent with family is always great! My kids are still home but leaving this weekend. That time seemed to go very fast but I work most of the time they are home. We are now on the downhill side of the 4th grade year. I feel like it has gone very fast. We have a lot of work to do before May.
Language Arts - This week's story is called The Life and Times of the Ant. I am sure you get from the title that this is nonfiction or informational text. The students found it interesting the first time we read it. They learned a few things from it. The illustrations are very enjoyable throughout the story. This is a plus because the focus this week in graphic and text features, which is the photos, illustrations, graphs, charts or diagrams that go along with a story. We are learning how these things enhance our comprehension of the story. In grammar we are talking about present and past participles and how to properly spell them. We also will discuss participle phrases. The vocabulary strategy this week was on the suffixes -able and -ible. Be sure to have your student look over their vocabulary words tonight. The first 5 questions on the test are the vocab words they have in their yellow packets. The next 5 cover the vocab strategy which will be words with -able or -ible in them. These first 10 should be easy and they should get them correct. The spelling post test and end of week assessment will be tomorrow.
Math - We have come back and learned 2 of my favorite strategies in multiplication. One is using Area boxes to multiply double-digit numbers. It gives them a great visual to see exactly what they are doing. They understand what numbers they need to multiply together. They see where the "partial products" are coming from. They seemed to really like this strategy also. Then we moved to the partial product strategy which is the same thing you just remove the area box or the visual. Some really like this strategy too. This is nothing new in math because I have been teaching this strategy for like 18 years. I really like the partial product strategy. I understand multiplication better because of this strategy. I took a class long ago on this and have been teaching it ever since. The kids really seem to like this strategy and do very well with it. We will move on next week to the standard algorithm or the regrouping strategy which we all learned as kids. This one never really made any sense to me, I just worked the process but never truly understood. When I learned the partial product strategy I understood so much better. I am pretty positive this strategy and learning it first benefits your students. They will be so much more prepared for math classes in the future.
Social Studies - We have finished up our next chapter on the Northeast states. They are working on a study guide and will be taking a test next Tuesday. When this is done we will move on into the Southeast region. We will be back to putting states in the interactive notebooks and studying the location of the states and memorizing the capitals. The students who did not master the Northeast states will now really be behind because we are moving on. The next map tests will consist of the Southeast only. We will learn about the natural resources, Native Americans and the important events that took place in the Southeast in the next two chapters. We will move through these chapters a little more quickly then the others. Mainly because they are used to the expectations and so it allows for us to do more in a class period. We need to keep moving because we have 3 more regions to go and as hard as we work time seems to slip away from us. They will be very busy children when it comes to Social Studies. But I know they like it! At least most of them do.
Thank you - To all those students who brought me gifts in December for Christmas, I really appreciate your thoughtfulness and generosity. I loved all the things that I received. They were all so special and thoughtful.
The next big thing that is coming up on our calendars would be Catholic Schools Week! It is everyone's favorite week of school. We do lots of activities and dress up days to celebrate our being a Catholic School. The teachers have started planning! It begins January 27th. Please be sure to sign up for Mass that Sunday. You will find a letter in the folder today asking for volunteers to help out in the ministries at church. There will also be a breakfast put on by the PTO to follow mass. Come join us.
Have a great end of the week and weekend!
God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels
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