Conferences, Snow Day, and a new FRIEND!

Team Jones was lucky enough to welcome Amiah to the group this week!  We love having her and she seems to fit in wonderfully!

We had quite a week this week including a SNOW DAY!  Thank you Team Jones for successfully completing the Snow Dance with me.

Our unit on fractions has begun in Math with our study of factors and multiples. We will also discuss Prime and Composite numbers on Friday.  Next week we will be comparing and ordering fractions.  I hope to get through this unit before the upcoming February vacation.

In Writing Workshop, we have taken everything we learned from our Personal Essay unit to begin a study of Persuasive Essay. Your writers will be working hard on drafting thesis statements with reasons  and evidence that also take into account a counter-argument.

In Reading Workshop, we will continue to learn the importance of including textual evidence when we answer questions about what we are reading. This is a skill that takes practice.  We will also conclude our partner books with a small project.

The American Revolution will formally begin before the break.  Currently we are learning about the causes of the war and the participants of the conflict.

I enjoyed the conferences on Tuesday and look forward to meeting with more of you next week.  Thank you for all that you do at home to support your 4th grader!

New Brain Break

The Sid Shuffle - Ice Age: Continental Drift

Wacky Olympics Training Video

Special thanks to Team Jones for helping me create a training video for the Wacky Olympics 2014.  Invitations will come home soon for your teammate to joins us in watching teachers from different schools battle it out on February 28th in the HS gym.

A Full Week!

We have a full week starting today!  I am so happy about all of the great things we have coming up!!

Don't forget that WEDNESDAY is the CHOIR/ORCHESTRA concert!  

Math this week will focus on wrapping up our study of long division.  Today we will be playing a computer game (Snork's Long Division) to get some additional practice with the steps.  Almost all of my mathematicians have mastered this!!  We will also be moving on to 4 digit division tomorrow.  Again, this is a skill that takes practice and thought. Rushing doesn't help anyone get the problems correct.

In writing this week we will finally be coming to a close on our personal essays. The students have worked very hard gathering, organizing and revising evidence to support their personal thesis statement. We will be working hard to revise introductions and conclusions this week before publishing. We will then be moving into the final section of this unit, persuasive essays. 

In Reading Workshop this week we are going to be focusing on using textual evidence when discussing text, answering questions about text, and writing about a topic.  The topic this week will be Child Labor.  We are going to spend time highlighting for meaning, reading with a purpose, and comparing different articles on the same topic.  The technical term for this is Close Reading.  Close Reading is a large section of the common core standards. 

We are about to have a REVOLUTION in Social Studies.  The colonists are NOT happy with the British raising taxes and it is time to fight back. 

Report Cards will be loaded to BC@Home on Friday.  A guide to the new report card was sent home last week.  Please remember that there are changes to the grading this year. It is very difficult for a child to receive a "4" because they must demonstrate an advanced understanding and show initiative to be challenged. Proficiency at the fourth grade level is a "3" and if a student is working to demonstrate a skill, that is a "2." I am looking forward to meeting with many of you for conferences. Just a reminder that we are on a tight schedule and must adhere to our start and end times in order to accommodate everyone. If you have not yet signed up for a conference but you are interested the link is:
www.SignUpGenius.com/go/9040E48AFAA2DA57-february  

We have enjoyed our recent time with buddies as well.  Last Friday we studied the Antarctic.  It is fun to see the 4th grade faces when we do activities with the Kindergarten class!

Thank you as always for everything you do to support our classroom!

Long Division

Click to view the Long Division SHOWME

http://www.showme.com/sh/?h=TucXlFA

4 Day Week

Welcome to a four day week! We will be busy but have fun too!

I would like to point out that HW is becoming an issue again. 11 assignments were missing today and 18 were turned in with no name. Your students know we will be working on this but anything you can do at hw time to help with binder and assignment checking would be a huge help.

We will continue to study long division this week. I will post a video next around the correct steps. We have been working on it now for 3 days and it should be getting easier. Feel free to help your mathematician at home on 1-2 problems but let them do the remaining 2-3 problems on their own. Again, knowing math facts will really help this process!

In Reading workshop we will conclude our unit on summarizing. They are getting better! The big idea is to only include the important details. We have moved from comics to short stories and will conclude the week by summarizing their partner books.

It is time to draft our Essays. We have done a lot of work prepping and organizing for this. I hope to have completed drafts by Friday! Then we will work on revising and making this work the best it can possibly be.

Our study of Colonial NY is coming to a close this week as well. Today we had a pop quiz to check for understanding and make sure everyone is paying attention to the work they have done in class. It was not great. We will be reviewing all of this information and taking a test on Friday.

Thanks for all that you do at home. You are wonderful!

Team Jones Pictures 2013-2014

Click here to view these pictures larger