WELCOME 2009! Can you believe it? We are about half way through our school year. Boy, time flies. I hope to make the rest of your child's 4th grade experience even better than the first half. If we continue to work together, we can surely do this! Please remember to e-mail or call me with any questions or concerns.
I hope you all had a wonderful winter break and are relaxed and refueled for the remainder of this school year.
Weekly Reminders:
*Lesson 15 spelling pretest on Monday.
*Open book science quiz on chapter 1, lesson 1 will be on Wednesday.
*Lesson 15 spelling test on Friday.
Plan Ahead:
*IOWA Basic Skills testing during the week of January 12. Please make sure your child gets plenty of rest and eats a good breakfast each morning. The children will be given time to eat their healthy snacks during the morning. We will test Monday through Thursday during the morning.
*Open book science quiz on chapter 1, lesson 2 will be on Monday, January 12.
*Verb test on Tuesday, January 13. Enrichment will be due this day.
Classroom Happenings:
Science: We will continue our study of animal and plant cells this week. The children should look over the information on the 5 kingdoms that will be coming home early this week. A quiz on this material will be on Wednesday.
Social Studies: The children will finish their research about their crop. We will then begin writing a rough draft and final draft of our Southeast Farmer stories.
Accelerated Math: Our study of geometry will begin this week. We will cover many concepts this week. The children will learn about points, lines, line segments, rays, planes, parallel lines, intersecting lines, perpendicular lines, and skew lines. We will also explore angles and use a protractor to measure angles. The children will then move onto a study of polygons.
Each child will be given a protractor to use during this unit. They are responsible for its safe keeping and will be expected to return it when it is no longer needed. It might be helpful to have a protractor at home too, so your child does not have to travel back and forth with it. We will begin using our protractors on Tuesday. Looking ahead...we will also be using a compass, to make circles, in the near future. The children will get one to use at school. This may be something you may want to get for home too.
We will be using a ruler compass like this:
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*(This type of compass is very hard to find. A regular compass will work too. I will show the children how to use both.)
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Spelling: The children will work with lesson 15 this week. This week we will be working with two rules - "ou" and "ow".
English: We will continue our study of verbs by covering past tense verbs with helping verbs, irregular verbs, and contractions with not. The verb test will be on Tuesday, January 13.
Reading: The children will share their figurative language projects this week. If your child was unable to finish before the break, I will give them some time to work on it, and they will share later in the week. If any work can be done at home that would help a great deal. We will also be reading a biography about Gloria Estefan. The children will work on vocabulary and comprehension this week. We will also continue working on the skill of compare and contrast.
Some children have said that they are unable to open files from their flash drive at home. In District 66, we use Open Office. You can download Open Office for free at: http://www.openoffice.org/.
