December Newsletter
Randy and Jocelyn's Fourth Grade Class
Important Dates
December 6: Hanukkah begins at sundown
December 18: Holiday Sing and early dismissal at 12pm
December 16: Final Vision Team Meeting begins at 8:30am
December 19-January 4: Winter Break
December 22: Winter Solstice
December 25: Christmas Day
December 26: Kwanza Begins
December 31: New Year's Eve
January 4: Teacher Work Day
January 28: Market
Joe explains Word of the Day Instructor position
The Character Tango @ GP&SF Concert
Working on Energy Posters
What We Are Learning
Social Studies- Economics We are moving into our Economics unit which will culminate with Market on January 28. Students will learn how to write a business plan for products they will make/bake/sew/design/write/draw or anything else by hand. They will have the opportunity to sell their products and buy from their classmates using Nishant Bucks (our classroom currency). There will be an exchange system of Nishant Bucks for materials needed to create their products for sale.
Other skills and Content covered:
- Bartering and Trading
- Wants vs. Needs
- Budgeting
- Goal Setting (short, mid and long term)
- Markets and Competition
- Opportunity Cost
- Goods/Services
- Innovation
- Producers/Consumers
More information on Market to come!
Math – Big Numbers, Estimation, and Computation- This unit will focus on extending multiplication skills and emphasize the reading and writing of large numbers.
Skills and Content covered:
1. Extended multiplication facts
2. Estimating sums and products
3. Partial Products and lattice methods
4. Powers of 10
5. Rounding and reporting of large numbers
6. Comparing data
Writing Workshop:
We are finishing up our Personal Narratives and will be sharing them aloud this week. Next week will we move into a poetry unit focusing on cinquain, haiku, free verse and lyrical poetry. Students will create a variety of poems to collect and share at the end of the unit.
Skills and Content covered:
1. Alliteration
2. Imagery
3. Metaphor
4. Onomatopoeia
5. Personification
6. Repetition
7. Rhyme
8. Rhyme Scheme
9. Rhythm
10. Simile
11. Stanza
12. Theme
13. Tone
Reading- We have begun reading parts of the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz to help reinforce positivity within our classroom community.
1. Speak impeccably
2. Don't take anything personally
3. Don't make assumptions
4. Always do your best