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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2021
Categories |