I hope you all had a great spring break. The weather has got to catch up with the season sometime, right? It was fun to see everyone back this morning with new tans, hair cuts, and the same great smiles. We are in the home stretch now--2 months to go! Here is a look at our week ahead:
* It may be April, but the colds and germs are still here :o( If you have any extra containers of Clorox wipes and are willing to donate, it is appreciated! Hopefully this will be the last request for these for the year. We're trying our best to wipe down the tables to keep things to a minimum in the classroom.
* Our Art Institute Field Trip is this Friday! More information about how to help your child prepare for this day will be coming home shortly.
* If you haven't turned in your brown report card envelope, please do as soon as possible. We will reuse these again for third trimester grades.
* The genre for April is poetry---it goes along with National Poetry Month! The kids will bring home their new assignment for this on Tuesday. This project will be different than the others, since poetry is such a different kind of genre in itself. The kids will take time to analyze poems and then have a chance to recite/perform their favorite for us at the end of the month.
* In reading we will do an overview of poetry with the kids. We will talk about how poetry is such a different type of genre and the various forms that poems can be written. We will also begin to talk about inferring. When we use inference skills we take what we know from our background knowledge and put it together with new things we learn from the text. This helps the kids make solid deductions and merge their schema with an evidence based guess. This takes lots of time and practice, so it is not a skill that we expect mastery in yet in fourth grade!
* In writing the kids will finish writing their response to literature about our main character, James, from James and the Giant Peach. They will create an interesting lead, revise their rough drafts, and get ready to type these in the lab next week. Any additional time that we have in writing this week, we will experiment a bit with writing poetry.
* In grammar we will work with main and helping verbs. The kids will get to know the definition of what a helping verb is and begin to identify them in a sentence.
* We will spend Tuesday in math reviewing equivalent fractions and addition/subtraction of fractions with like/unlike denominators. Hopefully the kids continued to practice their basic facts over the time off! We will also cover mixed numbers, converting fractions to decimals, and compare fractions.
* In social studies we will spend time learning about our last colony, Plymouth. The kids will continue to take notes on how to make a successful colony and factors that tend to hurt colonies as well. We will revisit the plan that the kids made about creating their own colony. The kids will take what they learned from their History Alive book and lessons and apply this to their own colony-making decisions.
* I think that covers it--have a great start to the week! ~ Mrs. Galazka
