Kudos to your kiddos for exceptional attendance in small group instruction! We love that students are on time, ready with materials, and excited to be part of their learning community. This week we’ll focus on increased responsibility with BLEND asynchronous assignments. As teachers, we’re previewing and answering questions about assignments during small group meetings. We’re also building in time for students to reflect on the quality of their work and completion of all daily assignments. As parents, we ask that you help your student to create responsible work habits by reviewing each day’s BLEND module and helping your child to check for completion of the day’s assignments. Creating this routine will help your child to gradually become more independent and responsible with assignment completion using BLEND.
We’ll be taking our first grades this week over skills that students have been practicing. Know that all official grades are recorded in TEAMS (not BLEND) and that you can view your child’s grades at any time through the parents portal. 4th grade readers are watching their characters more closely than ever! We notice character traits, how problems create an overarching struggle, and how these elements contribute to a story’s theme. We’ve been noticing contrasts and contradictions in our reading and pausing to consider “Why?” when we notice that a character’s behavior has changed. As writers, we are learning to analyze sentences for the many structures that create meaning for readers. We considered how each capital letter and punctuation mark have an effect on a sentence. With this heightened awareness, we edited our own personal narratives and look forward to sharing with each other this week. Our mathematicians solved their first Match It puzzle this past week. This routine provides an opportunity to build fluency with all 4 operations and promotes accuracy with computation. Thanks for your help as students are learning to take a picture of assignments and upload so their teachers can give feedback. This week we’ll continue to explore place value patterns and will move into decimals. We’d love to use a few dollar bills, dimes, and pennies as we represent decimals his week so please gather any that you have at home. You may have heard your 4th grader talk a little about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution last week. Please ask them to share the movements that help us remember the how and why behind these foundational documents. We’ll keep building our understanding this next week, so your student will have some assignments in BLEND that will continue to help them process these big historical ideas.
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Last week’s morning meetings about focus led to insightful conversations among our 4th grade TEAM. Students had ideas to share about how they manage time, work space, and “tune in” to learning while “tuning out” distractions when needed. This week we’ll continue to support creating those strong work habits. Your students know that their work products (digital or paper) matter. Much of our work is shared in small group meetings and teachers are working hard to provide timely, personalized feedback with each work artifact in BLEND. So many of you are building time into each afternoon to review that all assignments were completed and that the work reflects your student’s best effort. We so appreciate that support as students learn to navigate the BLEND learning environment.
Readers this week will continue to think deeply about characters. Students should be able to name the characters in the just right book they’re reading independently and list character traits with text evidence for those traits. Those traits help us to predict a character’s actions and help us to notice how characters change. We’ve also been noticing that a character’s learning is typically what the author wants us to learn, so this work of investing in our characters supports us to make inferences about theme. We’re having such rich conversations about books with your students during small group meetings and we know they’re working hard to invest in their characters when they read independently, too. Writers are thinking about the power of each word and punctuation mark they use. We’ve been sharing our personal narratives and getting to know our community of writers in the process. Students are engaging their growth mindset as they give and receive kind, specific, and helpful feedback. This helps each student to revise their piece so it provides detail where needed and tells a clear story for their audience. We’re starting a grammar routine called Power Revision that helps writers to become more intentional about their craft, so look forward to hearing more about that soon! Our mathematicians thought deeply about a word problem solving process that we call UPS check. We spent time in small math groups considering the importance of each component and how it helps us when we’re solving a word problem. This week your student will practice once again with their small group and then show their understanding by solving a problem on their own. Our process starts with a deep understanding of the problem, classifying the information in the problem into what is known (WIK) and what we need to know (WINK). From there we create a plan that translates the relationships in the problem into a math equation. Our solve steps are each written out, then checked with a different strategy. Our final step is to show that we understand with a solution statement. This is big work and we had thoughtful conversations last week about how this is a process that will work on many complex problems, so it’s an incredibly handy tool. We loved classifying and describing matter by its physical properties last week. Matter riddles were a highlight and students were so excited to share with their friends! This week we’re moving into social studies and considering our country’s founding. We’ll think about what America stands for through the lens of the Pledge of Allegiance and will learn some history as we discuss the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. Before we get to this week's learning, a big shout out to everyone for some terrific flexibility and creative problem solving last week! We know everyone is feeling stretched and challenged in our new virtual environment, but we are so impressed by everyone's resilience!
This week, we will be deeply examining FOCUS. What does it mean to focus? How does that affect our work and relationships with others? How can we set ourselves up to focus effectively? Be ready for them to share some fabulous ideas with you. In reading, we will be ensuring that our independent books are Just Right for us. We will be able to give evidence for why it's a good match, and students will be working on reading EVERY DAY for a period of time in this book. We will also be making friends with new characters! Students will discover that characters ARE the story - it's their journey, and that investing in them is our primary goal. Writers will start a draft of their first narrative story. We will discover the joy of critical friends and how drafting multiple times means a better product. We will also be learning two new word work (vocabulary and spelling) routines, and finding out how fun it is to work and collect words. Mathmeticians will be deeply exploring place value -- think BIG numbers! We will continue to be curious about numbers and find ways that math is all around us. We will develop more strategies to explain our mathmatical thinking. Students will be working with expanded form, number value, and reasoning. Our week in science will revolve around states of matter and developing minds that pursue inquiry. Be prepared for them to look for some hands on artifacts to share their understanding! We will also start our reflection portfolio called the "Write Rite." Taking the time to look back daily and re-process our learning experiences helps strengthen those neural connections. We look forward to a great full five days! We have been eagerly preparing...
And tomorrow's the day! To be Zoom ready, prepare a space where your child can easily sit and engage with the computer. We love to see those smiling faces sitting tall, centering themselves in their spot! In addition, have a pencil, sticky notes, and a notebook nearby. Don't forget their item that brings them joy! We know that there will be glitches along the way, and we are prepared to engage our growth mindset -- MISTAKES MEAN WE ARE LEARNING! Teachers will be online with kids in small groups or lessons from 8-1 daily, so know that if we don't respond right away via email, that's why. We have office hours daily from 2-3 to assist you. We will be checking our email at that time and getting back to you, but we also will be available at that time via Zoom. Use our same class zoom links during that time. The first week we will be getting the kids familiar and more autonomous with BLEND, schedules, and Zoom. We will spend a lot of time building community and a culture that focuses on learning. ELA this week engages us as active readers and writers. We will have FUN with books and discussion. Getting to know our Reading and Writing Identities is foundational. In math, we will discover how math is all around us. Numbers are dynamic, and can be represented and talked about in so many fabulous ways. We will examine and practice Netiquette in social studies this week, as that is a key piece in our virtual learning experience. Morning and Closing Meetings will be our time to get to know our entire 4th grade family. We are so grateful for each and every one of you. We will be writing a blog post here weekly to share learning, photos, and the goings on during our time together this year. We encourage you to subscribe via email at the button below to have it sent directly to your inbox. Happy final day of summer! |
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