Weekly Update

Hey Families!

We had a great week at BEU!  It started off with a bang on Monday for Grandparents'/Veterans' Day and didn't slow down one bit!  We worked hard and got a lot done!

Reading

   Students are still on the edge of their seats each day for our read aloud, Jack's Run.  This week, we worked on understanding theme within a book.  This is a tough concept for kiddos to understand.  We talked about how theme is reallyTHE MEssage the author wants you to take away from the book.  We have also talked about problems and solutions in a text.  This was a great conversation since last week we talked about cause and effect.  They noticed lots of similarities and differences between these two concepts.    

   Next week we are going to be doing some fun Thanksgiving readings and activities.  The week we get back from break, we will be talking about answering short response questions and beginning our study of words.  We will begin by talking about parts of speech.  Be sure to ask your child about words they are learning! 

Writing/Social Studies

   For the next few weeks, we are going to combine writing and social studies times.  When we return from Thanksgiving break, we are going to begin our study of the regions of Missouri.  In writing, we are beginning our study of informational writing.  We thought this would be a perfect time to combine writing and social studies.  Students will be writing about a specific region of Missouri.  They will study the region, take notes on the region, and teach the region to others.  Our final goal is for students to know how to research, write an informational piece, learn all the regions in Missouri and to teach others about what they have learned.  

Math

   We are now finished with our unit of study on multiplication.  Multiplying by a one digit number seemed super easy for this class.  Multiplying by a two digit number turned out to be a little more difficult.  We will continue to work on this as a class for those that need it.  I was impressed with everyone's hard work and effort.  For our short week next week, we are going to do some fun Thanksgiving multi-step word problems.

   After break, we are going to begin an investigative unit on division.  Students will be given situations and they will have to solve problems using any skill they can.  The objective will be to understand place value better and to introduce division.  I am super excited to get this started and let them dive into this unit.  

Etiquette

   This week we focused on dinner etiquette to get ready for our Thanksgiving feast.  On Tuesday, we talked about all of our favorite foods that we hoped would be at our feast:).  On Thursday we talked about table manners and Friday we talked about dinner conversation (hopefully the kids can help with any awkward silences at your Thanksgiving Dinner:).  

Important Dates

• November 21st- Thanksgiving Feast in our Class (thanks for all the donations!)
• November 23-25th- Thanksgiving Break
• December 15th- 4th Grade Music Program (6:30-7:30)
• December 20th- Winter Party
• December 21-January 3rd- Winter Break
• January 4th- School resumes
• January 16th- NO SCHOOL Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• January 20th- School Spelling Bee
• January 30th- Beulah Ralph's 90th Birthday
• February 6th- NO SCHOOL (teacher work day)

Busy Week!

We have been super busy this week!  On Monday we had our Veterans' Day/Grandparents' Day celebration and this place was packed!  It was so fun meeting all the kids' grandparents and special friends!  We were so proud of Lucas for being chosen by his 4th grade peers to read his "What America Means to Me" paper in front of the school and guests.  Thank you also to everyone who donated books to our class from the book fair!  What a treat!

Way to go, Lucas!

Have a great day!

Happy Three Day Weekend!

Hey Families!

First of all, thank you so much for the awesome Halloween party!  This was some serious fun!

I think this station was a favorite!

So fun that even that parents got in on it:)

Here's a rundown of the week:

Writing
Because we have our upcoming Veteran's Day/Grandparents Day Celebration, we are working on essays about "What America Means to Me."  We downloaded a new app and worked on planning out our ideas.  On Thursday we flash drafted, and next week, we will start publishing.  One student from each grade will be chosen to read theirs at the assembly.

Science
We took our science probe on erosion and weathering this week.  We've been studying these topics for a few weeks and we wanted to check in on how kids were comprehending this.  I'll send those home next week, but the kids did great!

Math
This week we took our multiplication test and the kids rocked it!  We reviewed on Monday and Tuesday.  On Thursday we spent time going over our mistakes and today we took a break to do some fun Halloween themed work.  We will move on to 2 digit times 2 digit multiplication next week.

Reading
This week, we focused on some super interesting non-fiction texts in small groups.  Some groups were reading about weather related books, while some read sporting books.  In our read aloud, we focused on comparing characters and how characters change.

Remember that parent-teacher conferences are coming up!  I can't wait to brag on these kids, so make sure you look to see if the assigned time I gave you works.  If not, no worries, just call the school office and they can easily reschedule you to a different time.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Allie

This Week's Happenings

Hey Families!

I just wanted to share a few pictures from this week!  Check back tomorrow for a weekly rundown to see in detail what we did!

We used the app "Explain Everything" to plan out our ideas for our essay "What America Means to Me."

Rory was our Citizen of the Month for October!  Way to go, sweet girl!!!

In September, the kids voted for awesome Annabelle as our Citizen of the Month!

These two are celebrating after our reading stamina went past 30 minutes!  Woohoo!

All in all, we've had a great week so far!  I'm pretty disappointed though that I forgot to take a picture of the funniest moment of this week.  One of my favorite candies is Good & Plenty.  I received some from my secret "Boo Buddy" and decided to share them with the kids.  I warned them beforehand that they were black licorice, but the kids just KNEW they would love them:).  Well, a couple of gags, frantic running to the trash can, and lots of extra drinks, I figured out that I do not need to share ALL of my candy.  Happy Thursday!

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

Happy Thursday!

I hope everyone had a great half day yesterday!

Earlier this week we took a break from our intense personal narrative writing and just had a little fun with creative writing.  Kids wrote poems, songs, and fictional stories based on a Halloween-ish picture.  We even listened to some spooky music while we were writing!  The kids loved sharing these out loud with each other

Of course we had to turn the lights out!

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In science we spent some time exploring our new National Geographic science books while we were reading about erosion.  The kids found some awesome science experiments that we may just have to do throughout the year.  I love how eager they are to learn- it makes my job so much fun!!!

  Have a good day!  

Weekly Update

Happy Friday Families!

Whew!  What an awesome week!  First of all, thank you so much to everyone who came to our breakfast this morning!  We had an incredible turnout and the kids kept talking about how wonderful it was.  I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us.  

It was a packed house!

We loved having our families here today!

Writing

We spent this week writing our final drafts of our personal narratives.  Kids used checklists to edit and revise and then conferenced with a teacher about their writing.  They worked SO hard and I was so happy with how they turned out!  Obviously the most fun part was sharing them with you!  After our personal narrative assessment, we will start working on some writing involving research.

Science

Last week we went outside for science and wrote down questions about the land around us.  Kids came up with some amazing questions!  We chose 3 to look at in more depth- 1)Why are there rocks lining the hill?  2)Why are there cracks in the ground?  3)Why is there netting over the grass and hay?  We spent some time hypothesizing about why these things happened and the kids had some great ideas.  This week, we watched a video about erosion and wouldn't you know... the kids connected what they learned about erosion to their questions from the week before!  They decided that the cracks were on the ground because of the weather changing from dry to wet and warm to cold.  They concluded that the rocks lining the hill were to PREVENT erosion from occurring, and the netting was to prevent elements of weather from washing away grass seed and hay.  These are some smart kiddos!

Math

We were all about multiplication this week!  We took our unit pretest and discovered that while we are very good at repeated addition, we are in need of some new strategies to solve multiplication problems.  This week, we learned how to use mental math to multiply multiples of 10.  We also used our rounding skills to estimate the answers to multiplication problems.  Today, we learned a fun strategy called the "Box Method."  We break apart our numbers by place value, multiply, and add.  Have your 4th grader show you using this problem:  54 x 5.

Daily 5

We started our new read aloud this week called Jack's Run.  This is the sequel to Zach's Lie, so the kids were super excited about it before I even read a page.  As we read these awesome read alouds, aside from pure enjoyment, we are also reading to work on reading strategies.  We are currently focusing on inferring, predicting, and strategies to solve unknown words.  We continued with Daily 5 rotations, but instead of chapter books, we are focusing on non-fiction articles (mostly science).  One of our articles told us that research shows it's actually the event that the sugar is present at that causes the hyperactivity, not the sugar itself.  Sorry that we had to bust that myth, but we all still agreed that it doesn't mean too much sugar is healthy!

Have a great weekend!
Allie