4News: September
Written by 4N Friends
A Word from Ms. Nguyen
It is hard to believe that we have already spent almost an entire month together! I have really enjoyed getting to know your children so far, and feel very lucky to be working with such a great group of kids. I am looking forward to a year full of learning and growing together.
This month, we have spent a lot of time getting to know one another and building our classroom community of learners and friends. We have also established our routines and are practicing how to be responsible, hard-working fourth-graders. We are off to a great start! Read on to learn more about what we've been up to in September.
Reader's Workshop
Hello parents, it's Sasha, Colin, and Nino here to tell you about our reading experience in 4N so far this year.
We're going to talk about reading intensely. We read for a long time. it means that you read like you are in the book right there with the characters. I love to read, so it was really fun.
Thanks for reading and please read again.
Writer's Workshop
Hello, grown- ups! This month in Writer’s Workshop we began writing our realistic fiction stories and developing our characters. It was fun, and we decided to tell you guys about it, too.
First, we want to tell you about developing our characters. To start, Ms. Nguyen gave all of us a planning paper to start planning our characters. First of all we had to come up with a name and age for our characters. An example- Pixie Jacobson, age 10. We also had to identify our characters' internal and external traits. Some examples for external traits are tall, tan, and brown hair. Some internal traits are funny, smart, and friendly.
We have to put some realistic problems into our stories so they don’t seem so perfect. For example, Anna’s story is about a girl that goes to a escape room lock- in and cannot get out! Now that has some suspense!
Second, we are going to tell you about how we came up with our stories. We came up with our stories by thinking of a small moment that happened in our life to help us if we didn’t have an idea. Sophia’s story is called nerds. It is about high schoolers who really want a new computer so they get a job but spend some money on bikes so they keep on working then once they get the money it gets stolen!
Did our 4N tips help you come up with creative ideas for your next great realistic fiction stories? 4N can’t wait to see your small moments come to life in the magic of writing!
Word Study
Hello grown ups! Welcome to 4N newsletter. This month in school, one of the things we’ve been working on is Word Study. Today we are going to explain some of the things that we’ve been working on in this subject.
One thing we learned about is our Word Study schedule for home. On Monday, you get your Word Study group words. You are in either the blue, green, purple or orange group. From Monday to Wednesday, we do spelling activities, such as ABC order, where you write your words in alphabetical order, and Choo Choo Words, where you write all the words with no spaces. You must do three activities and turn them in on Thursday.
We also do lots of Word Study activities at school. Once we get our words, we sort them into different categories. They are usually prefixes and suffixes. For example, if some of our words are monologue, uniform, monolingual, and unify, then monologue and monolingual would go under the category mono because the both have the suffix mono, and uniform and unify would go under the category uni because the both have the suffix uni. On Tuesday, we sort the words on our slate. On Wednesday, we do Word Study games, such as Speed Sort, where you try to sort the words into categories as fast as you can. On Thursday, we do a buddy spelling test to practice for tomorrow. We choose a buddy in a different spelling group and read the words to our partner while they write it on their slate or spell it out loud. Finally, on Friday, we take our spelling test. We are tested on 20 out of our 24 words. Then we do three bonus words that we haven’t studied before.
We love doing Word Study and hope that you enjoyed what we shared with you! Thanks for reading, we can’t wait to write to you again next month!!!
Math
Hello 4N grownups! We are going to be talking about some math themes. We've been working on place value, U.S traditional math, some projects, comparing negative and positive numbers, and finally rounding close but easier numbers.First, we are going to talk to you about U.S traditional math. See the picture below for an example!
Next, we're going to be talking about place value. Place value is a value of a digit. Hundreds is mostly what we have been working with. For example: The digit 3 in 372 is worth 300. Another example is the 8 in 98,752 is worth 8,000.
And that is all we have for today. BYE!!
Social Studies
This month in Social Studies, we learned about King George lll. He taxed people and made the colonists mad. King George lll was not a good leader to begin with. He did LOTS of unfair things that made the colonists mad. He made the men in the army stay in strangers' houses, he taxed the colonists for stuff they needed like sugar, stamps, and much much more.
Imagine you were in that time. You were never taxed before and all of a sudden, people started taxing you. Today you get taxed but for stuff like school and where you live. The taxing started when King George lll ran out of money because the war cost a lot of money. And to get money back, taxing was the best answer. But it was very unfair. This caused the Declaration of Independence.
One of the most fun activities was when we got taxed for candy. It does not sound fun to get taxed but it was. How it worked was there was a queen or a king, but it was a queen. The queen asked us questions and if we had what she asked we lost candy. Example: If you are wearing the color green, you owe 3 candy pieces.
We also learned about the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson and signed by Ben Franklin, John Hancock, John Adams and many more. The declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson.
Thanks for reading about Social Studies!
Science
Hello Grownups! Welcome To 4News! This Is Harrison and William and Quinn reporting from EH Elementary School! This month in Science we learned about… (Drum Roll) Soils! When You say it aloud it sounds sort of boring. But, it definitely was not!
The first thing we did with our soils was observe them. Soil 1 was very dusty. Soil 2 was made up of bigger rocks and hummus. Its humus, silly. Humus is animal and waste breakdown. Soil 3 is made of pebbles. And soil 4 is humus and dirt.
At the end of the unit we re-answered our “focus question," which is What is soil? We said soil was earth material made of clay, gravel, humus (animal and dead plant waste) , pebbles, rocks, sand, silt, dirt, and most other elements. Hills, plateaus, mountains, cliffs, almost all landforms are or were once dirt! It's time for snack so we have to say goodbye. Guess what I have for snack? Hummus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Read Aloud
Yo what's up, grownups. We're going to be talking about read aloud. It's awesome when our teacher reads aloud. It's so cool. Now, we're reading The Tiger Rising and before, we read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. There is this kid that is in 4th grade that won a competition and won a turtle named Dribble. When he went to his house, he had his little brother Fudge who “played with it” (ate it…)
Also, we started a book called The Tiger Rising. In this book, Rob is waiting for his bus stop and he sees a tiger. On the bus, he gets bullied and they stop at a new spot. Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it.
Mystery Prize Board
Hi grownups. Today we are going to tell you about the Mystery Prize Board.
So the Mystery Prize Board is a big laminated piece of paper. A piece of paper that has post-its covering it that say things like, "Everyone responds to the bell the first time" or "All desks are organized and neat." We have to complete those tasks in order to remove the post-its. Once we remove all the post-its, we get the prize written underneath. Right now, the prize is extra recess. There were 24 post-its to take off. We have already taken off 14! We also hope we earn game / technology day. Thanks for reading.
Other Fun Events
Important News & Events
Save the Dates: October
10/1-10/5 Week of Respect (See below for more information.)
10/3 Community Meeting @ 1:45 pm
10/5 Welcome Back Movie Night & Back-to-School Scholastic Book Fair
10/8 Parent Visitation, 9:00-11:00 (See below for more information.)
10/9 Parent Visitation, 1:00-2:30 (See below for more information.)
10/16 Individual Picture Day
10/17 Harlem Globetrotters Assembly
10/17 School Store
10/24 Salad Bar Lunch
10/27 Fall Fair
Ms. Nguyen
Email: anguyen@haddonfield.k12.nj.us
Website: anguyen.haddonfield.site.eboard.com
Location: 501 West Redman Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ, USA
Phone: 856-429-0811
Twitter: @MissNguyen200