December 1, 2014

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with good food and time spent with family and friends.

Upcoming Dates
Dec. 4 - 4th Grade Choir Performances
Evening 4th Grade Choir Performance - 6PM - Check with your child to find out the arrival time will be that night.

Friday, Dec. 5 - Spelling Test

Tuesday, Dec. 9 - Southeast, Southwest, and West States Test - Same format as our previous states tests.

Friday, Dec. 12 - Unit 3 Vocabulary Test

Math 
Last week we took a break from long division. We worked with input/output tables using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  The students had to find the pattern in the table and then continue it to complete the table.

We will continue our study of division this week. So far, we have worked a little with dividing 2 digits by 1 digit divisors and a little  more will continue with that.  Then we will move into 3 digit dividends divided by 1digit divisors and then 4 digit dividends with 1 digit divisors.

Please make sure that your child is still studying his/her math facts 10 minutes every night.  

Social Studies
We are studying Explorers. Christopher Columbus was our first one to learn about, and we definitely learned some new information about him.  The explorers we will continue to study will be:

Cabeza de Vaca, Marccos de Niza, Fransisco Vasquez de Coronado, and La Salle.

We will learn the country they represent, why they came to Texas, and lots of other interesting facts.

The students will take notes while we study these people.

Writing

We have finished our final drafts of our expository papers.  I am excited to read the final copies to see how well they all turned out. This paper will also be put into each child's writing portfolio. 

We did some fun Thanksgiving creative writing also.

Ask your child to tell you how he/she continued the story about Tom Turkey jumping into Farmer Sue's truck that was still running......

Coming up, we will continue to work with Expository papers and this go around, the students will be doing every part on their own. Of course,  I will be there for guidance as needed. I want to see how they are able to work mostly on their own starting from a given prompt to a chosen idea about the prompt. Then moving into prewriting, to a first draft, revising and editing and taking it to a final paper.

We will be focusing on commas this week, and learning all of the times in writing that we need to use them correctly.

Reading

We finished our poetry and figurative language unit.  Each student recited his/her poem well for us.

 We will be moving into learning characteristics of nonfiction.  We will look at some flipcharts that will show characteristics such as tables, charts, pictures with captions, and much more. The student will understand the fact that nonfiction is all real information.

Science

 We are learning about slow changes that happen to our Earth's surface. The students have been introduced to weathering, erosion, and deposition. These things can happen over time because of water, wind, and ice. We have watched some Brainpop videos and taken notes, and we have learned about the definitions of these changes to our Earth.  The students will participate in some hands on activities to be able to see examples of these.  Of course over time, the changes in our Earth's surface happen slowly, but hopefully these activities will give the students a good idea of how they happen.