There’s so much big work happening in 4th grade! Our schedule of small groups, minilessons, and morning meetings are all so important and we appreciate the routines you’re building at home so that students don’t miss that synchronous learning time. This week we’re also excited for our Friday fall fest. We’ll celebrate over Zoom on Friday afternoon from 2:15-2:45, so watch for more details from our fabulous TEAM 4th room parents.
Readers are becoming independent with the narrative summary tool that we call CSERT. We’ll continue to use this tool all year with a variety of texts, so please ask your student what each letter stands for and how they use CSERT to write a quality reader response. We’ll start exploring a new tool called “Say Mean Matter” this week that will help us to synthesize ideas and make meaningful connections. Your students are hard at work on their second narrative piece. Last week they brainstormed, planned, and drafted. This week we’ll be giving and receiving feedback as we meet with critical friends. We’ve learned from expert authors like the amazing Jason Reynolds about the importance of our very first sentence. We know from tools like sentence analysis and our work with apostrophes that each word, capital letter, and punctuation mark affect the reader. This week is an opportunity to apply those important lessons in the context of our own stories. Our mathematicians are using all 4 operations with increasingly bigger numbers. This is exciting work and it also highlights the importance of fact fluency. We’ve learned a few new tools that are helping us give those fluency muscles a workout. One of our favorites is a tool we call a tic tac toe that we can use for any multiple. We’re also using a game that teaches fact fluency in connection with other number relationships. The game is called Break Apart. A few minutes of fluency each day through the week will help us feel more confident as we tackle bigger problem solving in the weeks to come. We continue to reflect each day using a tool we call a Write Rite. This is an opportunity to think back through ways we connected with others and moments that helped us grow each day. As part of our health curriculum, we’ve also spent the time considering the importance of careful handwashing. We explored articles, watched experiments, and analyzed data to draw conclusions about healthy handwashing habits.
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Happy Monday, TEAM 4th! Those of you coming back, please remember that we have nut (peanut and tree) allergies. Please refrain from bringing items for lunch or snack that contain nuts. Thanks for taking care of each other in this way! Keep in mind that both teachers give feedback, assign grades, and have worked to build a strong academic relationship with your kiddo. When you email, please include both teachers each time so we can continue to communicate clearly and efficiently. Your students are finishing the first quarter strong and we’re excited about the attention to work completion and quality. Kudos to you for supporting with work habits and routines at home that help your student to own their learning and to build those responsibility muscles! Our 4th grade readers are becoming CSERT experts. We know that this narrative summary tool helps us to not just notice story events, but to invest in our characters and understand the story as a meaningful whole also. This week we’ll dive deeper into theme, the author’s message and typically the lesson that the main character learns through his or her struggle and resolution. In writing, we’ll brainstorm and start drafting our next story. We’ll consider the importance of the very first line and take inspiration from some talented published authors like the amazing Jason Reynolds. We’ll keep an eye out for the structure of every sentence and know that each needs a subject and a predicate. As mathematicians, we’ve been working to build deep understanding with all 4 operations and with the problem solving process that we call UPS check. We reviewed division representations and strategies last week, with students writing examples in their notebooks so they’d have a resource any time they needed a reminder. This week we’ll explore some tools beyond our tic tac toe that can help us with multiplication/division fluency. We want to know our multiplication/division facts smoothly so we are ready to tackle calculating bigger products and quotients without the need to skip count every part of the problem. We explored sinking/floating and our scientists enjoyed their own descriptive investigations last week. We saw lots of penny boat data and we loved the questions that came up about relationships between mass and volume. This week we’ll move into the importance of handwashing as part of our health curriculum. First off, a huge thank you to all of you for the treats delivered to us on Friday from our fabulous room parents. We definitely feel loved and appreciated! This week, we are analyzing narrative text and creating a high level reading response. Response to literature is something they will encounter for years to come, and we are building a strong base of what those contain. Grammar continues to focus on creating strong, accurate sentences. Knowing each building block as a writer gives us POWER! We will be able to not just write, but to CRAFT our writing. In math, we are using visual representations and strategies to build our knowledge of decimals. Students have been able to grasp the place value involved and are now moving into adding and subtracting decimals to the hundredths place. We are taking time to deeply understand the number sense involved and are asking students to accurately use mathematical academic language to describe their process. Ask them to read some decimals for you...they are no longer saying “one point two five.” They know to read it as, “one AND twenty five hundredths!” We will be exploring density this week in science. Students will be discovering more about buoyancy -- and finding out why things as heavy as an iceberg float! This past week, we began reflecting on our work and our understanding. Looking at a concept or piece of work and evaluating whether we know something on a surface level, deep level, or transfer level (we can teach someone else) is the first step. Once we think about that, it’s important to formulate next steps. What questions do I have to clarify my understanding? What can I do to learn EVEN MORE about this? As educators, we do this every day ourselves, and know that it improves our work and directs our own learning. Developing this skill in fourth grade will set them to learning for themselves, not simply for completion or a grade. Here’s to a fabulous week to come! This week we will implement our new schedule. We are anticipating some mistakes -- our brains keep growing!
It's important at this point to sit down together and look for any unsubmitted work. Teachers have given feedback and left comments. Take a look at the right column in Blend at all assignments and make sure there is something turned in. Teachers are using these assignments to design lessons based on kids' understanding or need for more instruction. Be aware that completion is a part of 9 weeks grading. Readers and writers will be exploring how to determine importance in text. Discerning the main idea from detail will help them summarize and write with a focused purpose. Fourth grade is a pivotal time in interacting and understanding this concept in all genres, but especially expository nonfiction. We will be working with vocabulary and spelling using the words from last week's lists. In social studies, we will continue to focus on critical thinking and reading. We learned last week that a nonfiction piece is a VERSION of the facts...it is not a complete rendering of a situation and will have writer slant. Questioning the source and using multiple sources is key to a more accurate picture of an event or person! We are expanding our understanding of place value and moving into the tenths and hundredths! TEAM 4th will explore decimals and fractions of numbers. We will use decimals and money first, and begin moving into adding decimals. TEAM 4th will be examining metacognition -- thinking about our thinking. How well do we understand this? What do I need to know more deeply? What are my next steps to gain that understanding? This is a crucial piece in becoming an active, autonomous learner. Looking forward to a fabulous week together! |
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