Welcome back! We hope your November break was full of rest and time with family. This year has given us so many opportunities to exercise our flexibility as a learning community and we’re going to explore that concept over the next few weeks in an integrated project.
As readers, we’ll explore a series of biographies about subjects who adapted to challenging circumstances. We’ll consider the contributions of each subject, how he or she demonstrated resilience, and how they amplified their voice as a solution seeker. Students will have opportunities to study character traits, evaluate multiple perspectives, and determine important ideas using our 5-word strategy. In writing we’ll review independent and dependent clauses as building blocks of complex sentences. Then we’ll learn more about conjunctions and their role in sentences with two subjects and one predicate. We know that sentence structure helps us to communicate ideas clearly as speakers and writers, so this is such important work! We’ll also consider the importance of focus in our own narrative writing, so you may hear/see some short small moment pieces from your student’s notebook this week as we write about moments from our Thanksgiving break. By mid-week, we’ll be studying examples of quality expository writing and learning to organize our own ideas about adaptations using this text structure. As mathematicians, we’re going deeper with division this week. We’ll review how to visually represent multi digit division by dividing hundreds, tens, and ones into groups. We’ve seen that it’s much more efficient to first divide out groups of hundreds, breaking up the hundreds into leftover tens if needed. This observation helped us see how regrouping works with multi digit division, so this week we’ll explore the traditional long division algorithm and see how it relates to the visual strategies that we’ve used so far. Science and social studies this week are all about adaptations in the world around us. Students will asynchronously explore adaptations in plants and animals. Then they’ll learn about ways that humans have adapted or modified the physical landscape of our planet. It will be a pleasure to connect with you during conferences this week. We are truly grateful for your support and for the opportunity to partner with your family this year!
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Our community Sharing heads and hearts No rulers required. These words became a poem in my head this morning. We all have been active parts in creating, 6 ft. or more, a community -- one that depends on each member to be complete.
We want to take a moment to pause and appreciate how special and significant that is. We know this is a perfectly imperfect time in all our lives, but we do know we can connect in our human experience of it all. Thanks for sharing your children with us. We are leaning into building relationships with each one, and enjoying the unique little people they are. Enjoy the week off. Rest, relax, and rejuvinate! Best, Jewellyn and Jen As part of social-emotional learning this week, TEAM 4th grade will explore mindfulness. Morning messages will highlight the benefits of increased awareness in the present. These include improved attention and focus, improved self-management, and greater self-compassion. We’ll consider the difference between a mind full of past and future thoughts versus the practice of bringing awareness to what’s happening right now. Some of our favorite tools for this important work include mindful breathing and using your 5 senses to ground yourself in the present. If you’re interested in tools that you can use at home with your family, visit the AISD Mindfulness page.
We’re looking forward to meeting with you during your student’s upcoming conference. These important conversations are scheduled for the week after Thanksgiving during the afternoons. Know that science/social studies/health will be asynchronous that week so students and teachers can fully engage in conferences at home or at school. If you’d prefer that your student NOT attend, please let us know via email. All students are reflecting on their strengths and goals this week in small groups, so their perspective will still be at the center of our conversations. The end of our second 9 weeks is fast approaching and that means that many of your student’s BLEND assignment grades will be added into TEAMS and used for report card averages. Teachers have created a time each week to support students individually with asynchronous work completion and quality but is is challenging to support everyone remotely. Please create a time each day or each week to help your student check for any missing assignments in BLEND. Know that rubrics and checklists are included in many of our recurring assignments (CSERT, Match It, PODS). These tools empower students and clarify expectations for quality work. It’s exciting that so many students read teacher feedback carefully, then revise their work and resubmit. We are happy to raise grades until the 9 weeks end in mid-December. While assignments may say “LATE” in BLEND, that is so assignments populate appropriately in our gradebooks and BLEND “to do” lists. We welcome any questions, so please reach out via email if we can further clarify. Our 4th graders will explore complex sentence structures this week. We’ll talk about independent and dependent clauses, so you’ll probably hear the acronym AAAWWUUBIS. This is a handy reminder of the conjunctions that signal a dependent clause at the beginning of a sentence. As writers, we’ll put a comma to separate those clauses. We’ll also explore various perspectives on Thanksgiving as a national holiday and will revise/edit our 3rd piece of the year. Mathematicians are building fluency multiple times each week using a combination of efficient strategies that build number sense, daily application in small groups/minilessons, catchy songs, and kinesthetic tools. Our goal is to know all of our multiples up to 12x12 with accuracy and efficiency. With all of our multi digit multiplication work, we know that fluency with facts makes the big work of multi digit calculating much easier. This week we’ll work on those multiples of 9. We’ll also continue to deepen our understanding of division by reviewing the various modeling strategies we’ve used so far and extending these to bigger numbers. We’re hearing from students that it’s exciting to be able to divide using a missing side strategy. Long division will be the next step soon and we’ll be ready! It's the middle of November already! We begin to turn our attention to the changes fall brings - leaves begin to brighten the landscape with bright orange, red, and yellow...
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