Tuesday, January 13, 2015

First Week Back News

Dear 4B Families,

Welcome back! We jumped right in and we are 

  • editing our non fiction books, 
  • learning new vocabulary for our solar energy studies, 
  • reading poetry as a class, and 
  • jumping into fractions as a continuation of our decimals studies!


During our poetry unit, we will focus on the following author's craft/poetic devices, so feel free to point these out when you are reading with your child:

  • similes, 
  • metaphors, 
  • personification, 
  • alliteration, 
  • rhyme, and 
  • rhythm 
We are working on reading poetry fluently in front of our classmates, and this is great practice for our oral reading skills.   

As we work to publish our non fiction books, we are working in a language skills booklet to review 
  • capitalization rules, 
  • introduce more about comma usage, 
  • practice identifying run on and sentence fragments, and 
  • reviewing parts of speech from early on in the year. 

Yes, this is instruction in grammar.

MAP tests come again at the end of January, so I will not give any summative assessments for math until after the MAP tests. We will simply push hard through decimals and fractions, which is new material for most of the kids. Luckily, poetry is a hugely creative and open unit of study so having more difficult math while we're working on poetry is a great combination!

Math worksheets for fractions/decimals skills will be coming home on some days. On other days, Khan and IXL for fractions should be added to the homework plan. Here are some topics:

  • comparing fractions
  • converting between mixed numbers and improper fractions
  • adding fractions with like and unlike denominators
  • converting fractions and decimals, such as .2 is 2/10 and .02 is 2/100
Both IXL and Khan for grade 4 are built for the grade 4 Common Core Math Standards, so any activity is going to help your child grow!  

Reading assessments will happen over the next 3 weeks and we will what current Just Right bins need to be used for each of the kids. This level will be reported out on the next report card.

Thanks for reading!
Ms. T