Hi everyone! I’m looking forward to a great week!
*Important Announcements*
*Picture Day: Information came home last week about our Spring Picture Day which will take place this Wednesday 2/27. If you would like to purchase a class picture, please return the payment envelope with payment on Wednesday. All students will also have their individual pictures taken. Those pictures will be sent home at a later date for you to decide if you would like to purchase.
*MAP Goal Setting: Thank you for returning the signed benchmark assessments paper and the MAP Goal Setting sheet. I will be sending home a copy of the Goal Setting sheet with your child this week to keep. Students will keep this paper in their English folder so that you all can reference it at home. As your child works on Study Island “My MAP Learning Path” at home, please refer to the page so that you know which areas to focus on.
*As a reminder, students will take the Reading MAP test on Thursday, April 18th and the Math MAP test on Wednesday, April 24th.
Below is the link to the NWEA website and their Parent Toolkit:
https://www.nwea.org/parent-toolkit
*Dr. Seuss Week: The week of March 4 – March 8 we will be celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday! Below is the schedule for the fun dress-up days that have been planned:
- Monday – Wear rainbow colors for My Many Colored Days
- Tuesday – Wear crazy socks for Fox in Socks
- Wednesday – Wear pajamas for I’m Not Getting Up Today
- Thursday – Wear a hat and/or red, black, and white for The Cat in the Hat
- Friday – Wear your SPES spirit wear and Say “Hooray for Diffendoofer Day”
- Saturday – SPES Book Fair at the Short Pump Barnes & Noble from 12 – 3
*Recorder Reminders: Please remember that students should be practicing their recorder at home throughout the week. Your child has the Recorder Karate music in his or her Music Folder and should be practicing the next song in order to earn the next belt. As Mrs. Garcia explained in the letter sent home with recorders, you can record your child performing a song and email it to her so that your child doesn’t have to “test” in music class. Doing this really helps cut down on the testing line in class, and your child can do it in a much more relaxed environment at home. Thank you for your support with this!
*What Are We Learning In Class?*
*Reading:
This week we will continue working with the comprehension skill of understanding cause and effect. We will move on to look at cause and effect in nonfiction as we read through a text about Mount Everest. Please encourage your child to look for these cause and effect relationships in a variety of settings, such as in the text that they are reading at home, in the conversations that you have, in events in your lives, and in the tv shows/movies that they watch.
During small group rotations, students will meet with me in small group and we will continue our strategy work using leveled texts. Students will also read to self and work on their writing. I’m very proud of how the students are so excited to read the books on the 4th grade “Book Celebration” list! Remember, if your child chooses to participate in this reading program, he or she will need to complete 8 books and take a short quiz on each book by Friday, May 24th.
Due to the 2-hour delay last week, which caused a slight change of schedule, I decided to give the students a few additional days to review their word study words we learned last week. The class will take their Word Study Test on Monday 2/25. We will then take a week off from word study this week in order to focus on grammar. We will work on singular possessive nouns and figuring out how to determine if a noun needs to be plural or possessive. I have noticed this to be a confusing skill for students, and developing a better understanding of this skill will really improve their writing.
*Math:
This week we will complete our unit on measuring length. On Monday we will continue with how to measure to the nearest 1/8 of an inch. Please encourage your child to count the parts of an inch in eighths and then make sure that they reduce their fractions to simplest form. For example, when measuring using inches, we don’t say “2/8 of an inch,” we say “1/4 of an inch”; and we don’t say “6/8 of an inch,” we say “3/4 on an inch.” Please refer to the “Incredible Inch” in your child’s math notebook. After we work on US Customary measuring, we will take some time practicing how to measure length in centimeters and in millimeters.
Students will take the Length Test on both U.S. Customary and metric systems on Thursday, 2/28.
*Social Studies:
Our class will take the VS.7a Causes of the Civil War Test on Tuesday 2/26. The class has really enjoyed learning about this time in our history, and has asked some very interesting questions! Later in the week we will continue this era by learning about the events of the Civil War as we begin our VS.7b & c unit. This week we will learn about the key leaders on the Union and Confederate sides during the war.
*Science:
On Monday of this week students will do some investigating with batteries, light bulbs, and wires. They will work with a partner to create different examples of circuits and see which types of circuits will create closed circuits and which will create open circuits. Later in the week we will move on to discuss magnetism and how it relates to electricity. We will also learn about the impact that Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, and Michael Faraday have made in our understanding of electricity and magnetism.
Students will take the Electricity and Magnetism Vocabulary Quiz on Friday, 3/1. Students made these flashcards last week, and have been reminded for almost 2 weeks to be studying these terms. Next week, we will take the Electricity and Magnetism Test on Wednesday, 3/6.
Have a great week!
-Mrs. Jacobssen