This week, readers will finish following Salva and Nya’s journeys in A Long Walk to Water. We have learned to summarize, predict, and infer along the way. It’s been exciting to hear readers asking about our next book already too! They’ve caught the reading bug. Encourage them to continue applying the strategies of pausing, following the character, and summarizing as you ask them about their independent reading books.
Writers are rounding the corner on next week’s STAAR writing test. We have been reviewing and applying our knowledge of all things grammar and expository writing. They are ready! We’ll be finishing up our review by talking through expectations on testing day this week. We started building geometry vocabulary with some kinesthetic activities on Friday. Students showed lines, rays, points, and more using their arms. Multisensory learning is so helpful to help our brains remember content for longer periods of time. This week we’ll classify angles as acute, right, obtuse, or straight. Then we’ll use protractors as tools to measure angles more precisely. At home, you can ask your student to identify parallel and perpendicular lines in the world around them, show acute/obtuse/right angles with their arms, and explain why protractors include number lines to measure angles. In social studies, we will examine the events of the Texas Revolution. From the Battle of Gonzales to the Treaty of Velasco...we will cover the important battles that brought us to annexation as a state. Knowing the pieces of our history is essential to appreciating and understanding the now...and sparks curiosity as to why things are how they are. Remember we have a student holiday on Friday - the week is going to move quickly!
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Welcome Back! We hope everyone had the opportunity to rest and recharge this past week.
We are ready to hit the ground running, and finish these last nine weeks strong. Our fourth graders are that much closer to becoming fifth graders! With that in mind, we are jumping right back into those high expectations and work habits that will have them prepared and ready. Writers are wrapping up their final weeks of preparation for the STAAR writing test on April 6th. The last few weeks are where we really apply all that we have learned about expository writing: outlining and organizing, beginning with clear introductions and central ideas,developing examples and giving strong supporting details, and ending with a meaningful conclusion. In addition, we speak a new language: we know how to talk sentence structure! Subjects, predicates, dependent and independent clauses, conjunctions -- we know how each play a specific role in creating complex and compound sentences. We know the jobs apostrophes, quotation marks, and commas do. Now’s the time to show what we know. We will be reviewing this week and next. In reading, we are pursuing our independent reading books daily and applying the new strategies we are learning through our book, A Long Walk to Water. It’s exciting to hear the cheers when we open the book together. Students’ weekly reflections show how much readers are growing, not just in their comprehension of this book, but in their reading processes in general. “I am pausing to think and predict, like we do together,” and “I am paying close attention to my character now, like we do with Salva and Nya. It helps me make sense of what the real struggles are.” are some of the wonderful things readers are sharing. We are a little over halfway through the book -- stay tuned and ask your child what’s happening! We are finishing our study of data science this week in math. Students have become experts in representing data points using 3 different types of tools. We’re using frequency tables to organize data and show how many times a value or event occurs. We’re using dot plots and stem-and-leaf plots to create visual tools that represent data. Finally, we’re using stem-and-leaf plots to show each data point using place value relationships. We’ve found connections to fractions, decimals, addition/subtraction, and place value as we explore graphing. It’s so helpful for us as learners to find meaningful connections between concepts because our understanding deepens and we remember content better. In science, we’re considering the importance of the water cycle. We’ll review the many ways that water is constantly moving around our planet and why it’s essential to take care of our water supply. This concept includes lots of vocabulary, so we’ll play some games and create a colorful diagram to show the relationships between parts of the water cycle. Welcome to another full week! We are so glad to hit the ground running!
We continue to focus on content in learning...it’s not just task completion. Research shows that internal motivation comes from knowing the purpose of something and seeing why it matters. We are also emphasizing how doing EACH DAY'S work builds a strong understanding. Waiting until this week when grades are due isn't the time to start doing the work. How can you help? Be an audience! Ask them to show you their work from each day - not as a “gotcha,” but as a curious learner yourself. Ask them to teach you the word work or math strategy from the day. Find out what the character in our novel did. This coming week, we will be investing further into our characters, Salva and Nya. If your kiddo hasn’t told you about the book - ask them! They have learned so much about refugees, reading strategies, and how to think about how they read their own independent books. We are reviewing those complex and compound sentence structures in word work. Ask them about independent and dependent clauses, conjunctions, and how punctuation works with those types of sentences. In addition, we will be writing another expository piece this week. Our 4th grade mathematicians are off to a strong start in the world of data science! We’re exploring many ways that symbols, colors, and number lines can represent data points. This past week we analyzed climate data through a choropleth map from the New York Times. We considered how much data must have been collected over time, the importance of accurate measurement, weather instruments that meteorologists used to collect data, and the purpose of analyzing data as a way to inform choices. We’ve also enjoyed collecting data about our TEAM 4th community and are learning about frequency tables and dot plots as helpful ways to represent these smaller amounts of data. We celebrated as a community of scientists on Friday at our virtual BCE Science Conference. If you haven’t yet had a chance to see the contributions of our scientists, check out our BLEND homepage for a link to student presentations. You’ll learn about quokkas, the pull of gravity on planets in our solar system, chemical reactions, and much more! |
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