The First Week of February

Will the groundhog see his shadow? Whether he does or not will not affect our schedule. We are full steam ahead and have our first full day week in quite a while. We can do it! Here's a look at our week ahead:

We begin unit 4 in our Treasures reading series. The theme for this unit is "Viewpoints" and we will begin taking a look at different viewpoints by reading "Dear Mrs. LaRue". The story is actually told from a dog's point of view. We will be working with fiction and nonfiction to generate conclusions and determine generalizations.

For grammar this week we will focus on pronouns and antecedents. A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun. The antecedent is the word that the pronoun is replacing. Large words for a simple process! The kids will work on identifying pronouns and looking at how the pronouns and antecedents relate to each other.

We will go back to having 2 spelling lists this week. The kids will take a pretest on Monday to determine which spelling list they will be assigned. Our spelling list this week has words with inflected endings. The kids will be working with words that have an -ed or -ing pattern.

In math we will take what we know about long division and apply it to word problems. The kids will work with interpreting remainders on Monday--should the remainder to the problem be ignored or does the remainder indicate that we need to round our answer to the problem up? There will be a division quiz on Tuesday for the children. They are allowed to use either the partial quotients or traditional method for their quiz. Tuesday through Thursday will be spent working with protractors and angles. The kids will experiment with full-circle protractors and we will practice angle names and rotations found on a clock. We will also work with half-circle protractors. We will review words such as vertex, acute, right, and obtuse. Friday will be another problem solving day for us in class. We are working hard to show ALL of our work on paper, label our answers, and explain WHAT we did to solve the problem as well as WHY we did the steps.

Now that the kids are pros at using battery and light bulb holders, they will have the chance to create an open circuit to test which materials are conductors and insulators. We will also talk about parallel and series circuits. They are doing such a great job experimenting with the activities we've done so far. Who knew that electricity could be so much fun?

In writing we will look at how adverbs can add to a piece of writing. We will work to make our writing more descriptive by using appropriate and invigorating word choices. We are also practicing analyzing characters through text. The kids are finding examples of emotion in text and proving how they can connect to this character.

Since Monday is the last day of January, STARS lunch will be coming up soon. I will be sure to send a note home to the kids as soon as I know the date and time. Please remember that if your child has made STARS lunch, the lunch he/she brings needs to be peanut and tree nut free!

The kids are taking their debate and reading long response skills to court! That's right--we are now 4th grade lawyers looking for evidence in the text to prove our opinion is correct. While our lawyers are working hard to their theme music (Law ad Order, of course), I also told them they are welcome to bring in any items that may make them feel authentic. This can be as simple as a tie, hat, special pen, etc that can help them in our courtroom--I mean, classroom :o)

I think that does it for this week. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. Have a great week and we hope to see you on Friday for the Fun Fair!