News for February 8

Dear 4B Families,

Thursday the 12th of February is our all day trip to Hyundai. Closed toed shoes are essential and kids without them will have to wait in the lobby. Bring water and lunch too! We will walk to the bus from the covered patio at 8:25 upon the bell's clang, so kids should only bring their field trip essentials to school that day. French school kids will need to hustle.

For Book Week, we will participate in two workshops with Lauren Stringer. She will teach us about illustrating poetry, which is "great timing" since we have launched poetry studies in 4B. Poetry will continue for the rest of the year at least once or twice each week, so that we can dip in and out of poetry reading and writing as we work on our other units.

Our "in class" "On Demand" for information writing is finished. Report card narratives will speak about your son or daughter's progress on these skills. Some students will have additional guided practice with the skills during literacy. Homework now includes Stop N Jots. If 4B students are not doing these, they will not have evidence for their reading strategies and they will not receive "applying" for reading skills on their end of year reports. Without practice using a text clue(s) to build an inferential theory, to compare themes across texts, and/or to make connections... students will not have the skills to independently meet reading standards. ***Teachers will constantly model during mentor text reading, but students must write down their ideas and keep them in their reading notebooks.

MAP testing is scheduled for March 3, 6, 10 and 12 in this order: science, reading, language, and math. We are happy that math is last because this gives us more time to learn fractions!

Solar Energy studies continue. Students are working with data, graphing, and making inferences about data in their conclusion write ups. This is all "team" work, so students must do their share -usually one-third- of the work. Some students want to take over and some students are extremely timid. We are working on finding our voice and the courage to share. And, some of us are working on finding the courage to listen and hold back our sharing.

For more on Lauren Stringer visit her website: http://www.laurenstringer.com/

For math, fractions continues... IXL is awesome!!!

Students are bringing home a math mixed skills check in assessment and a list of practice items that they wrote up as they each reflected on their progress. Please sign the paperwork and make sure your son/daughter returns it for his/her data file. 

Thanks for reading!

Ms. T