J4 SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES TERM 2

• Support students in taking charge of their independent reading lives. Talk with your child about their reading preferences to help build a reading plan. It’s so much easier for kids to keep reading when they have a plan for not just the book they’re reading currently, but for the next several books. They could decide to do an author study, or to read a whole series, or to find books that all tackle a common issue. You might browse to find lists by genre, like this list of mysteries, or go to a bookstore like Books of Wonder or Bank Street Bookstore, or visit your local library for great recommendations.

• Talk to your child about the books they’re reading. So much of the work of fourth grade is deepening comprehension and inferential thinking. The more young readers talk about the characters in their books - the problems they’re encountering and how they’re dealing with them - the more flexible their thinking will be as they read on in the book. Ask questions like, “What kind of person is your favorite character? How do you know?” or “When has the character made a bad decision, and how did that turn out?”

• Write a book recommendation for a book you love to read. Bring the book in to class and share this writing with the class.

• Encourage your child to practice storytelling. Fourth graders are working on fiction writing this term. You can support this work by encouraging your child to tell a part of their day like a story, especially encouraging elaboration. You might prompt them by saying, “What did you do exactly? What were you thinking? What did you say?” These are all ways they are learning to elaborate in their fiction writing. You might also play some storytelling games as a family. You could try the “add a line” game: one person starts the story with “Once upon a time…” and then the next person adds on a next part, and a next part, etc.

• The Museum of the City of New York has another very relevant permanent exhibition that you may like to visit with your child. The Museum’s Port City gallery allows you to “...travel back to the time of Henry Hudson’s voyage into New York Harbor and follow the story of the city as it grew into the nation’s economic and cultural capital, on the shores of the Western Hemisphere’s busiest harbor.” I highly recommend it, along with the museum’s many other exhibitions. Here’s a link to learn more: Port City 1609-1898.

• The National Museum of American Indian–New York, is located within the historic Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House. The museum has permanent and temporary exhibitions as well as a range of public programs, including music and dance performances, films, and symposia. The museum is free to enter and will enable you and your child to explore the diversity of the Native people of the Americas. Here’s a link to learn more: https://americanindian.si.edu/visit/newyork

• Students can read An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz with the support of an adult.

• “Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.”

• Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city? Find out by exploring the Welikia Project, and navigate through an interactive map of the city in 1609. You can find your block, explore the native landscape of today’s famous landmarks, research the flora and fauna block by block to discover what the ecology was like in 1609 and compare it to today. Have fun

• Area Model Multiplication Area models practice. Explore - Generate - Play game

• Drag Race Division Race to answer basic division problems. Students can race one another or play against the computer.

• Xtra Math This free, web-based, math fact fluency program includes addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

• neXtu Players place shapes on a tessellating game board, collecting points and capturing opponent's pieces. Math concepts include: greater than, less than, tessellations, and symmetry.

• Sammy’s Symmetry Shuffle Place pattern blocks in the correct positions to complete the pattern/shape on the line of symmetry. Three difficulty levels.

• Lines of Symmetry Click on shapes with one, two, or more lines of symmetry.

• Alien Angles Slide a bar to position a ray to estimate different angles in order to rescue lost space aliens.

• Airlines Builder In this Cyberchase game, players must construct 3 different ships with the same perimeter by clicking and dragging edge pieces. After the ship is built, the "seats" are filled to show area.

• City Building: Missing Area Factor Space control to explorer: your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a colony on the moon. Kids must determine the missing dimension to create a city for the newest moon inhabitants. Perfect for practicing area calculations, this game helps players understand the relationship between area and length.

ACTIVITIES TO PRINT

• Classify angles, triangles & quadrilaterals

  • Classify angles as acute, obtuse or right, triangles as equilateral, isosceles or scalene and quadrilaterals as squares, rectangles, rhombuses or parallelograms.

  • Classify angles - acute. obtuse, or right

  • Classify triangles by their sides - equilateral, isosceles, or scalene

  • Classify quadrilaterals - square, rectangle, rhombus, or parallelogram

• Area & perimeter

  • Perimeter and area of rectangles - given two sides

  • Perimeter and area of irregular rectangular shapes

• Circles

  • Circumference of circles - given the radius or diameter

Symmetrical shapes

• • Lines of symmetry - draw lines of symmetry

  • Reflections - Identify & draw reflections

  • Tessellations - which shapes form tessellations?

  • Rotational symmetry - recognize rotational symmetry