Mrs. Beck's 4th Grade
Late November/December Edition
Happy Holidays
I was humbled by all the wonderful and generous gifts I received from all you...thank you so much! Look for individual thank you notes in the kids' Thursday folders.
Secret Snowman Gifts!
Exchanging Gifts
CME Holiday Sing Along
Pioneers
World Class Outcomes:
Analyze multiple relationships and their influence on change
Evaluate how environment and culture influence sustainability
Create knowledge through the process of inquiry based on multiple evidence
We finished building the base of our wagons and the kids took them home to add the details. The final project isn't due until Jan. 14th. Then, we'll hop right into our next project: Sod Houses. More about that later.
Literacy
If anyone wants to volunteer to lead a book group, I still have one opening. :)
For homework, I was having kids looking at main ideas and supporting details in non-fiction articles, and we will definitely get back to that. However, DRA and MAP testing and just my general observations reveal that overall, the kids don't have a great grasp on root words/prefixes/affixes, so our homework in reading for the next few weeks will be around word study.
In writing, we are continuing to work on writing a persuasive argument and using facts/details to back up our opinions. We'll be honing in on structure and organization as well as making sure our sentences are well crafted.
Starting Tuesday, January 5th, kids will have full access to Sumdog reading. Yay! Their login for reading is the same as the one for math.
Math
The kids did really well on our Tables and Graphs unit. I've sent most of the tests home--there are a few kids that I want to review with first--those will go home in upcoming Thursday folders.
Our next unit is on Probability--including averages, mean, median and mode. I'm super excited about this unit because we'll be pairing the Math in Focus curriculum with a really cool simulation on Game Design. This will really push our critical thinking and creativity skills!