Hi, September 12, 2014
We had a fun afternoon enjoying some cool jazz music from the Austin Jazz Workshop. Ask your child about it!
Our student teacher, Mrs. Allison, began teaching some of our social studies lessons. She is doing an amazing job and has been a wonderful addition to our classroom. She will gradually continue taking over the planning and teaching of the lessons.
Our pen pals will come to school on Tuesday! You are welcome to come and enjoy our visit with us. They will be here about 9:00 and stay until about 10:30. We wrote letters this week introducing ourselves. During the visit, we will interview our pen pals about their childhoods and play games together. The children are excited and can’t wait to meet their pen pals! Join us for the fun!
Friday is Spirit Day! We are all encouraged to wear Forest Creek shirts or shirts that are green or purple.
On Friday, we will begin meeting with our reading buddies in Mrs. Garcia’s class. We will read with them every other week. This helps us practice fluent reading and encourages the fourth graders to be role models for the younger kids.
Read about our week:
In reading, we read some realistic fiction books and wrote about the story elements. We took a reading assessment on a passage from the book, Piper Reed: Navy Brat, and will be reviewing the multiple- choice questions on Monday. We continued to read our choice novels independently. Please help your child to keep his/her choice novel inside the backpack when it is not being read. This way it is always available when there is some time to read.
I started assessing reading levels individually this week and will continue for the next few weeks.
Thank you for signing reading logs, encouraging your child to read daily, and complete books. A summary and response of the reading is due on Wednesdays and Fridays each week.
In writing, we continued collecting entries for personal narratives. We noticed that quality personal narratives are small moment stories, which have an interesting lead, a sequence of events, and lots of great details. They zoom in on the most important part and tell why the event was important or what was learned because of the experience. We will continue writing about our experiences next week and chose an entry to revise, edit, and publish.
We also had fun writing creatively about a Chris Van Allsburg illustration from the book, The Chronicles of Harris Burdick. We then read a story by Tabitha King (Stephen King’s wife) about the same illustration. It was interesting the totally different stories that came from the same illustration. We will write about another illustration from this book next week.
Spelling lists began this week and we had our first spelling test today. Each week, your child will receive a list of words. Five of the words are the same for the class and they include words from our TEKS such as homophones, irregular plurals, Latin/Greek roots, etc… The other five words are individual to each child based on words misspelled in their writing/reading responses and tricky word patterns determined by a Words Their Way assessment. The words will be glued into your child’s agenda each week and a test is on Friday. During that test, the children will also be asked to write a few sentences from dictation. These sentences will be graded for spelling and capitalization/punctuation.
In social studies, we completed our posters of Texas landmarks. They are hanging in the hallway and the children did a great job describing their landmarks, finding quotes about them, and telling why that landmark is important to Texas. They also made beautiful illustrations. We began our study of the regions of Texas by going on a virtual bus trip through the Mountains and Basins Region, the Coastal Plains Region, and the Central Plains Region. We will visit the Great Plains Region on Monday and continue to study maps and the geography of Texas.
Thank you for sharing your child with me. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns. Have a wonderful weekend!
Sincerely,
Pam Bartholomew
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