Parent Letter 9~24~2010

The 4th graders have had a busy couple of weeks! During the past couple of weeks the students have gained many new skills, have experienced new and exciting things and grew in leaps and bounds.

We have gained new skills in math by taking our first math test. You will not find these in the Friday folders, as I tend to keep the first tests to go over with you at conferences. I felt that students did their best and succeeded well. Then we started chapter 2 and will continue working hard on that during the next few weeks.

Experiencing new things comes from going to Cannons and Redcoats. Students were excited about many of the stations that we attended. They learned about making wooden paddles, wooden bows, shearing sheep, French dancing, a new game Graces, and also hearing 4 real cannons shoot off. We talked about the field trip and that they will attend again next year and do more activities related to this field trip.

We are finishing our spider research and will write a paragraph about it. To finish our spider research students will be asked to create a spider model including putting the spider model into its habitat. More expectations and due dates will be given to the students next week.

Charlotte’s Web is coming to an end. We are on chapter 16 of 22 chapters. Soon Wilbur will be going to the fair. This means that the 4th grade fair is fast approaching. On Monday, the students and I will be talking about the different activities that they will be able to participate in during our 4th grade fair. I look forward to finishing the book and celebrating with our 4th grade fair!

Finally, the students had quite the spelling list this week! Homophones are difficult for students. However, we also tackled homophones in language this week. Students created pictures and sentences that went with homophones. We used the Smart board to sort homophones and play a matching game with homophones. It is amazing how many homophones are a part of our English language. It is important that students continue to use these words so we will continue throughout the year to look at homophones when they come up in our reading or writing.

Congrats to Brendan, Zach, Kailer, and Maddy M. who are our new Student Council representatives. I have some exciting things for them to get involved with here at school and for them to share with students 3-5.

Dates to Remember:
• Tuesday, September 28th: School Pictures
• Wednesday, September 29th: Out at 1:15 Teacher Inservice
• Tuesday, October 5th: Field Trip to NICC’s Dairy Center
• Monday, October 11th: No School Teacher Inservice

Parent Letter 9~10~2010

Welcome to the third week of school! The students have already done so much in these first three weeks. It will be fun to see how much more than can do the rest of the school year. I am having lots of fun with them with their learning and look forward to even more exciting times with them.

In reading, students continue to expand their knowledge in story elements (setting, plot, characters, etc), and learn more about the Zuckerman’s and Arable’s. We are half way through the book and a quiz will be happening late next week. More info about the quiz will come home early next week.

Science goes hand in hand with reading right now as the students are studying about spiders. We have covered general spider information and now students will be researching their own spiders. The research that they will be collecting includes description of their spider, habitat, food/diet, and young. This information will help them build a spider model in the near future.

Math is coming right along. Students are almost at the end of the chapter 1, learning about large numbers, their place value, and how to order them. We have been working on story problems here at school. They are difficult for the students, but slowing down and reading sentence by sentence helps to understand what the book is asking them to find.

Writing continues to be about adjectives. We will one final lesson on adjectives and then will introduce verbs. Students wrote short paragraphs about a picture this week. They couldn’t use the objects name in their paragraph so it challenged them to describe the object using wonderful adjectives. The students enjoyed this activity and it got them up in front of the class.

Next Week:

*Monday I will have sub in the room as I am attending training in Elkader.

*Tuesday students will take their final MAPS test in the morning and I will gone again in the afternoon for another training in Calmar.

*Wednesday students will be dismissed at 1:15pm as we have an in-service.

*Thursday is a NORMAL school day.

*Friday we will be going to Prairie Du Chien for our first field trip. We will be going to the Cannons & Redcoats reenactment and learning stations. See field trip note for details.

Please make sure your child gets a good night sleep on Monday evening for the MAPS test on Tuesday. If you have questions about next week please feel free to call or e-mail me here at school.