The Week Before Thanksgiving

The kids are just a few days away from completing their first trimester of fourth grade! Progress reports will go home with your child on Friday and then there will be no school again until November 30th due to parent/teacher conferences, Thanksgiving break, and teacher meetings. I look forward to talking to you about your child next week. Please make sure that you turn in your green conference sheets by Thursday, November 18th, to better help me prepare for our meeting. Here's a look at our week ahead:

Our theme this week in reading is snakes. We will be using both fiction and nonfiction text to help us make inferences. An inference is when we take what we know from the text and our own background knowledge to make predictions or opinions about how characters are feeling or what the author has not stated directly in the story. We will wrap up our novel in our small groups as well!

We continue to work with possessive nouns. This week we will focus on the difference between a plural noun and a plural possessive noun, as well as how to tell the difference between the two.

Our spelling list this week include words that have the "ar" or "ir" sounds. These endings can have -ear, are, air, or ere spellings.

Our math unit has us working with decimals. This week will focus on decimal addition and subtraction (and the importance of lining up the decimal points!). We will also talk about decimals in money (including vocabulary such as withdrawal, balance, deposit, and interest), place value to the thousandths, and metric units of length. We will take our mad minutes test on Tuesday and Thursday this week.

The kids continue to work on showing the reader what is happening in their writing pieces by adding descriptive details. We will also review how to correct run-on sentences, combining sentences to connect ideas, and identifying sentence parts. I will be showing you some of their WEX work during conferences next week.

They are working hard on their Native American projects! The kids chose a tribe to research last week and spent time using books, the internet, and the ipads to research their topics. This week we will have another big day of research and we will talk about how to sort through all of the notes they have taken so far. The kids will have an opportunity to join an online chat on Thursday at 7:00pm about the project. There will be another date after Thanksgiving break as well in case there is a conflict with Thursday and your child is not able to join (if he/she wanted to). More information about this chat will come out as we get closer to the date).

There will be no Weekly Folders this week. I figured that the report card will be enough information about your child for you :o) If there is anything major that comes up this week, I will be sure to email you and let you know.

We will only have 15 minutes during conference times to discuss your child's progress. In order to make sure that I stay on schedule, I will need to stick to this time limit. If we find we need extra time as we are talking, we can schedule an additional conference for after break to finish up.

I think that covers everything for now. Have a great week and I'll see you next Monday or Tuesday!