Dear Parents,

     Happy Thursday!!!  I hope everyone is having a great week.  For my it is Homecoming week for my Senior.  It is so hard to believe that she is there.  It has been a fun week but busy.  Cross Country in Knoxville on Tuesday and Perry tonight makes for a very busy week for mom!  The weather has been pleasant but sounds like it intends to cool off.  It will be a very chilly football game tomorrow.  We have had a really good week in 4th grade.  I feel they are finally getting the hang of a class routine and also how Mrs. Sickels does things.  We are to the point of really enjoying class and learning.  I love, love, love when we get to this point.  It means I can have some fun with teaching!

Language Arts -  This week we are reading a Tall Tale called "Stormalong".  It is a story about a baby that is giant.  He grows into a very big, strong man.  He is determined to live his life on the sea.  He proved himself a great sailor but it just way too big for a boat.  He travels inland to try his hand at working the land, but he is not happy.  He goes back to the sea.  They build him a giant boat that he can fit on.  He is now happy.  We are paying attention to characters in this story.  Trying to decide what kind of a person Stormalong is by how he interacts with others. We worked on reference materials as our vocabulary strategy.  They focused on dictionary entries and what they tell us.  In grammar we learned or reviewed capitalization.  It focused on historical events and documents, titles of books or stories, and today we are  learning names. languages, and Nationalities.  The spelling list was a bit of a challenge this week.  It was over homophones.  These are words that sound the exact same but the spelling depends upon the meaning of the word.  An example would be wait and weight,  sent, cent, and scent,  and heard and herd.  The students will take their post test tomorrow. They will also do the end of the week test.  Next week we will do our first Unit test.  It will be quite difficult.  They are shocked by what they have to remember from the first 5 stories and lessons. 

Math - We are finishing up chapter one.  We will be completing it next week.  This week we have learned how to rename numbers (hard and some struggled), we have reviewed adding large numbers and now subtracting large numbers.  The subtraction gets hard due to regrouping.  Sometimes there is a lot of zeroes in a problem that have to be regrouped.  We will then move onto problem-solving.  That will be our last lesson before we begin studying for a test.  I will walk them through how math testing works.  We first take what they call a "dress rehearsal".  They will actually be given the test without any practicing(this is the practice).  If anyone gets a perfect paper they are done.   I will then go over the test and every problem with the class to model how the work is done.  They will then take the final test and this test will be scored in the grade book. This gives each student the opportunity to be successful on the test.  Miss Surma does the same thing.  We learned this strategy at a conference we attended last October.  It proved highly successful with our classes last year.  We really collaborated on how to make it work.

Social Studies -  We have taken our first test.  The students all did very well on it.  There were a lot of vocabulary words which some had some trouble matching.  You will see the test today.  Please sign it and have your student return it to me.  They have made corrections and I have based their score off their corrections.  Please look through to see how they did.  They are working on a couple of map skills worksheets before we begin our next chapter.  One of the map skills is focusing on the compass rose.  We will review how to follow one and what the cardinal and intermediate directions are on it.  We will dig into chapter 3 next week.  We are moving along very well in this subject. I hope to keep our pace going.

CDC Guidelines -  Please be sure to read Mrs. Simmons "St. Malachy Minute".  It talks about the new guidelines for quarantine.   Also be sure to fill out the google form on conferences and whether you prefer a face-to-face conference or a video call.

Homecoming!  We dismiss tomorrow 3 hours early.  That means instead of 3:15 you will need to pick up your students at 12:15.  It is a Spirit Day tomorrow!  Bring your dollar to wear your sweats with panther gear!  It will be a good day to do it.  The temperatures are suppose to drop tomorrow.  Remember our dollars go for a great cause.    There will be NO LUNCH served tomorrow due to the very early out.

I hope all of you enjoy your weekend.  The Fall temps are definitely here.  I am going to enjoying my last Homecoming as a parent!  I am really okay with this.  After 3 girls, definitely okay with it.  I will happy to just look at all the pictures next year instead of worrying about taking them!

God Bless,

Mrs. Sickels