Week of January 10th

Let me start by welcoming everyone back to school and wishing you all a happy, healthy new year. The kids came in Monday morning with smiles on their faces and slightly sleepy eyes. Having Art as the first class back from break was a nice way to ease back into our 2020 school routine. I book-ended the week with a STEM activity, a paper airplane flying contest. As you can see from the above picture, everyone was engaged and enthused with this challenge

We began our new math unit, area and perimeter. This will take us through the next two weeks and then I believe we will be jumping right into fractions. We pre-tested the kids for the fractions unit on Wednesday and will once again be sharing the kids throughout the five 4th grade teachers and Mrs. Skutch.

Our study of innovations and how they changed people's lives continued using the car as our model. We watched several videos containing primary source information to give us a better feel for the era in which car manufacturing exploded. We looked at the advent of the electric car and had a brief discussion as to why, until recently, it never caught on with the masses. We also are reading an informational book about the automobile and taking notes from its articles directly onto our graphic organizer. Lastly, we concluded our SCAMPER activity that we had started before break, the results of which I am proudly exhibiting in our hallway as the kids did a phenomenal job with this activity!

In reading, the kids have been put into five distinct research groups and they are learning about severe weather events. Each group has assigned a sub-topic to specific members and together they will present their information in the form of a Public Service Announcement. It really is quite amazing to see these videos as they are wonderfully informative and voluminous in information. We are finishing the body paragraphs of our personal opinion essays in writing and will be starting on our introductions and conclusions next week. This week we focused on revising our initial paragraphs of support to make sure everything we included was relevant to our thesis and specific support statement.

Next week we have our Winter MAP testing sessions. On Monday morning I will administer the reading test and on Wednesday morning the math test. Please try to make sure your child has a healthy, protein based breakfast and a good night's sleep the night before as those are the only aspects of testing that are in your control.

Enjoy the weekend, stay safe and warm!