4th Grade Weekly Update Week of September 16-20

Thank you so much to the Allman family! On Tuesday, Mr. Allman shared different types of lenses and telescopes with our class! Thank you both for taking the time out of your busy day to give our class this special learning experience. On Friday, we met with our Book Buddies for the first time! We made bracelets and read books. Check out the pics below! I’m also uploading the pics to our Shutterfly site since I’m limited with how many I can load on my blog. So, if you don’t see an individual picture of your child with their Book Buddy, check out the Shutterfly site!

Please look in Friday Folders for confirmation letters for our upcoming conferences.

Tomorrow, on Sunday the 15th from 2:00-4:00 students are invited to attend the Wood Acres 50th birthday celebration! They each received a tshirt on Friday to wear if your family is able to attend.

Science: Last week, students experienced a real treat as Mr. Allman, Eva’s dad, set up a special demo about different types of lenses using high powered telescopes! It was very exciting! Students did very well on our first unit test. It was graded and sent home in Friday Folders. Now, we are continuing to explore the compound microscope and learning the different advantages gained with each objective lens!

Math: We will begin the first lessons of our combined chapter 2 and 3 addition and subtraction unit. A detailed list was attached to my last blog post of the lessons we will be covering if you need a refresher. Last week, we started the unit learning about addition properties: identity, commutative, and the associative. We will continue with addition algebra concepts, starting with expressions and variables. Students will use these variables to create addition and subtraction sentences. Some mental math skills will be reviewed from last year, but will increase in difficulty by using larger numbers and an additional addend or subtrahend. We’ll cumulatively review the skills and tie them all together at the end of the week!

ELA: Students did not receive a new spelling list last week; we’re taking a week off to focus on phonics and using the terms we tested on last week in context. The phonics skills we’re covering this week are consonant digraphs, such as sh, ch, th, wh, and ph. This would be a great time to work on the first quarter book report without spelling words to study! We’ll continue our novel study this week, by reading chapters 5 and 6 in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Over the course of the week, students will write journal entries in response to excerpts from the book and share them with their classmates to deepen their understanding.

History: With Constitution Day approaching, we’ll review the importance of the day and the history surrounding it. We’ll complete a little project that helps break apart the Bill of Rights terminology. We’ll then begin our next unit which will focus on World Mountains. This is a fun unit that ends with a project making a mountain brochure using Microsoft Publisher. Our first lessons will be all about mountain formation and finding examples of each type.