Newsletter-Hard Working Week

Hi,

Our class worked hard this week!

Thank you to all families who were able to come to Back to School Night. Thank you for helping your child with the decoration of their writer's notebooks. All of the books look fantastic and the children did a great job telling stories about their decorations. Thank you to Grace for sharing her wonderful cello playing with us and to Cayge for sharing his adorable dog, Bruno, with us. Thank you also for sending your child to school each day ready to learn, ready to work, and happy!

Don't forget that we have PE on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays so be sure that your child has the appropriate shoes.

Reading-In reading we began working on some comprehension strategies. We read a book called How Many Days to America? by Eve Bunting. It is a book about a family who arrived in America by boat from an island in the Carribean. As we read aloud we listened to our inner conversation. We wrote about questions, wonderings, tricky words, connections, and feelings about content and characters. We wrote our thinking on tons of post-it notes and discussed the theme of the book. We practiced writing about our inner conversations by using magazine articles from National Geography for Kids and shared what we learned and noticed. We also read part of an article about Asian artifacts being stolen and sold. As I read some of the article aloud, I modeled how my comprehension broke down at times and what fix-up strategies I used to help get back on track. We will be practicing this more next week. We will also be using some articles and children's literature on 9/11. This year is the 10th anniversary of that tragedy. We will be thinking through the texts and again leaving tracks of our thinking to help monitor our comprehension. We will also be looking at text features in expository (non-fiction) text and how these features help us to learn.

Writing: We read a poem by Maya Angelou and discussed the figurative language used and the images it created for us. Then we read more poems and books with similes and metaphors and discussed how the writer used these comparisons to describe and help the reader get a picture in his/her head as they read. We then read the book, The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown and used the format of that book to write important poems about ourselves. We took our poems through the writing process-drafting, conferencing with teacher, revising, editing, and publishing. The kids did a wonderful job and our descriptive poems are on display outside our classroom. Be sure to stop by and enjoy them!

Math: We continued to work on place value. In fourth grade, the students need to be able to read, write, and use numbers up to 999,999,999. We used our 1,000 books to practice skip counting strategies and practiced adding and subtracting multiples of 10 and 100. Then we found those numbers in our 1,000 book. We used a number line strategy to figure out numbers to 1,000 starting with a number in the hundreds. This strategy allows for getter understanding of number concepts and for less mistakes subtracting a number from 1,000 and regrouping so many zeros. We also added to check our answers. We played some games to practice using and manipulating numbers to 1,000. Next week we will continue to work with large numbers. We will compare them (greater than, less than, and equal), add and subtract them, order them from greatest to least or least to greatest, and estimate using these larger numbers. We will do an activity involving population sizes of states and solve some challenging problems.

Social Studies: We are using a powerpoint with photos of the regions of Texas to go on a virtual bus trip. We are learning about the geography of the region and some cities in each region. We will be doing some activities about each region and work on a post card project. Each student will create a post card about one of the regions and write about it. Some map skills will also be practiced during this time. We are using the photos that you sent in of places in Texas to see examples of some of these regions as well. Thank you for sending them in. Check out our map in the hallway and see all the cool places that we have been.

Thank you for sending a healthy snack each day and a water bottle.

Dates to remember:
Monday, September 5-No School
Tuesday, September 6-PTA meeting/WATCH DOG kick off-6:00pm
Friday, September 9-Grandparent Day during lunch time 11:55-12:25
Wednesday, September 14-Early Release Day


Have a safe and relaxing holiday weekend! Thank you for sharing your child with me! Please contact me with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Pam Bartholomew