I teach Language Arts (reading, English, spelling) and Math. My homeroom students will be with me for those subjects. They will also travel to Mrs. Urmson's room for 80 minutes each day for social studies and science classes. At that time, I will teach math to Mrs. Urmson's class.
Our goals in fourth grade are to improve comprehension skills as well as build vocabulary. I really want the students to enjoy reading and learn to choose books that interest them. Improving writing skills will also be a focus.
We will begin the year by learning about parts of a sentence (subject and predicate). We will be writing simple and complex sentences. We will review punctuation marks and how to appropriately use them. We will be learning how to write a paragraph with a topic sentence and a concluding sentence. We will also learn to include details that relate to our topic sentences. These skills will be a focus all year as we learn to write stories and reports. In addition, we will learn parts of speech this year which will help students add variety to their writing.
We are using a program called Wonders. We are reading a variety of genres. We are also working on fourth grade skills with each genre (sequencing, compare and contrast, author's purpose, setting, character, plot, fact/opinion, theme, main idea and details, making inferences, drawing conclusions, first person/third person).
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We will be using a program called Bridges in Mathematics. The focus is exploring various strategies to solve problems. I want students to see that problems can be approached differently, and the same result can be reached. This will help students to find meaningful ways to solve problems instead of memorizing formulas and algorithms that may not make sense to them. My goal is to engage students and make them active learners!