Before we start with news, we wanted to say a huge THANK YOU for the generous gifts. We were able to eat, drink, and pamper ourselves over the break. We appreciate the thoughtfulness and the creativity of the room parents who so creatively put them together!
Welcome back as we start Q3 strong on TEAM 4th! As 4th graders, your students will be participating in the first annual Bear Creek Science Conference. This is an exciting opportunity for students to develop expertise as scientists through a project and topic of their choice. We’ll be discussing the wide variety of project choices over the next 2 weeks and supporting students through the next 9 weeks of work time. Please visit the Bear Creek Science Conference website for more information and expectations for each project choice. Know that you’ll hear much more information once we’ve talked with students about the different project choices. Also note that Bear Creek is NOT having a traditional science fair. If your child would like to participate in the Austin Regional Science Fair, you need to email 4th grade teachers ASAP so we can get your student registered by the upcoming deadline. Please review the details of science project expectations if your child chooses to compete and be prepared for your child to start experimenting ASAP as the timeline for a science project in the regional fair is much faster than other project options. We’ll spend the upcoming week in ELA learning a new tool for synthesizing our ideas about text or images. It’s called Say, Mean, Matter and it supports students in moving beyond a literal interpretation to deeper levels of meaning and global connections. We continue to build our sentence analysis muscles and patterns of compound/complex sentences. We’ll also read several texts together that invite us to think about MLK’s contributions and how we as members of the Bear Creek Community, can continue his work today. As mathematicians, we’re celebrating how 5 minutes/day of fluency practice are supporting the fluency goals we set each week. Your student can tell you whether they’re focusing on multiplication or division this week and which fluency game they’re choosing to help accomplish their goal. We’re also revising decimal understandings using visual tools like number lines and models. While we learned about tenths and hundredths at the beginning of the year, it’s helpful to review decimals as we get ready to start our upcoming fraction unit. Our Rube Goldberg machines were such a fun way to celebrate the growth mindset in our 4th grade TEAM! Students used the engineering design process to solve a simple problem by creating a chain reaction with household items. After drawing their blueprint, they enjoyed two days of building and lots of opportunities to “fail forward”. It was exciting as teachers to see students move from “I can’t build anything like that!” to “I built another Rube Goldberg machine because it was so much fun!”. Thanks for your support with materials and videography -- your continued support this year means the world!
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