Weekly Update

Hi Families!

We had such a wonderful week in 4th grade!

Writing
Aside from our creative writing time at the beginning of the week, we gave students a personal narrative "on-demand" writing prompt.  They had to plan and write a personal narrative all on their own to show what they had learned during the personal narrative unit.  I'm so looking forward to reading these and to share them with you at conferences!

Science
We continued working on our weathering/erosion unit.  There's nothing better than students actually seeing the effects of erosion, so in addition to looking at the erosion outside of our school, we also looked at some picture that a 4th grade friend took while he was in Colorado recently!

Math
These kids are seriously knocking multiplication out of the park.  When we took this unit pretest to see what strategies students already had, most students used repeated addition to solve large math problems (ex. 45 x 9).  While some of them got these problems correct, the amount of work they had to do to get there was exhausting them!  Now, we are feeling super successful not only with the traditional algorithm, but also the "box method."  I'm so proud of how these kids don't back down from a challenge!

Daily 5
We continued working on our inferencing, predicting, and solving unknown words skills.  We took a review/pretest last week and went over that in reading groups this week.  Today, we took our reading post-test and not to my surprise, these kids dominated it.  I love working with these sponges- it makes my job SO fun!

Materials Request
Our class is almost out of loose leaf paper because we have been writing like crazy!  If you have any you'd be willing to donate, we would be very appreciative.  Thank you!

Important Dates:
October 25- 3-5 Citizen of the Month Assembly (2:40)
October 28- Fall Party (2:30)
October 31- NO SCHOOL
November 4- BEU Movie Night (5:30)
November 7- Parent Teacher Conferences (3:30-7:30)
November 8- NO SCHOOL
November 10- Parent Teacher Conferences (3:30-7:30)
November 11- NO SCHOOL
November 15- Picture Retake Day
November 23-25- Fall Break