Merry Halloweenmas!

I hope everyone is enjoying the white Halloween!! Our Walk-a-thon was great this morning and we had great weather for it.  Progress Reports went home on Friday, please return the bottom portion as soon as possible.  I also sent home a notice last week regarding parent teacher conferences.  Many of you have already signed up and a confirmation notice went home as well. 

We finished our guided reading groups on Rocks and Minerals last week.  We worked on comparing and contrasting as well as vocabulary surrounding our rock unit.  This week we will begin a unit on immigration.  We will be exploring Ellis Island, Angel Island and the reasons people immigrate to the United States through picture books, historical fiction stories, and shared reading.

Unit 2 in Math is coming to an end.  We will finish our unit with place value, composition and decomposition of numbers, as well as subtraction and addition of numbers.  We have also been working on our CBM (Curriculum Based Measures).  Students are given multi-digit subtraction with regrouping and given 3 minutes to solve as many as they can.  Students are graded based on the amount of numerals they have gotten correct.  The target for 4th grade is 33 numerals.  You will see a few of these come home today.  The students have been improving greatly with practice.

Our pumpkins came our wonderful!!!  Thank you to all the parents who donated supplies and time to help with this project.

I hope everyone has a wonderful and safe Halloween! 

Lisa Kiernan

Great Job on NECAP!!!

Whew!  NECAP is over!!  The students worked hard on the Reading and Math NECAPs during the past 2 weeks.  Now we can get back to our normal schedule!!

Throughout NECAP we finished our Shared Reading Book, Room One by Andrew Clements.  The children are finishing up a response activity using the book.  They all created a character from the story and used details from the text to responded to Character Change, as well as an "If I met" response.

We began Unit 2 and have started graphing Halloween Decorations.  We are creating an interactive bulletin board for the hallway.  Our graphs are complete and the next step is to create questions for our graphs.  The Unit 1 post tests will come home this week.  Please look over the post test and the attached reporting sheet.  We are asking for the reporting sheet to come back with the test.  I will include 2 copies of the reporting sheet, one is for your records.

The Pumpkin Studies information went home on Thursday.  We are asking for small pumpkins (sugar pumpkins) for this project.  We tried to contact a few local farmers but the pumpkin supply is low this year so we are asking for your help in getting the pumpkins.  The donation list also was sent home on the bottom of the notice.  We are in need of lots of volunteers on the 25th from 1:00-3:00 so if you like to get messy (and you have your BCI check on file) please consider lending a hand.

Our Mock Rocks were a success.  We discovered that rocks can be broken down into smaller material.  Once the materials can no longer be broken down we have found minerals.  Rocks are made up of many different ingredients, minerals are made of only one!

I hope everyone has a wonderful week!!!

Mrs. Kiernan

Our new itinerant schedule is posted on the website.  Click here to view

What a September!

It's hard to believe that September is just about over! We have had a great first month of school! The students have become accustom to the class routine! I will utilize this blog as our weekly newsletter to families updating you on the comings and goings of room 146. I will try to update the blog on Fridays, or during the weekend. I will list the activities we are working on in each subject in an attempt to shed some light on the things we do in school, I'm sure you probably get the same answer to the "what did you do in school today" as I do when I ask my own children. So here goes... 

Reading 

We are finishing the DRA, a reading assessment that helps me find your child's instructional level in reading. Our reading groups will also be made from the information gained from the DRA. We are also working together to learn the ins and outs of our reader reasponse journals. We are reading Room One by Andrew Clements as a whole class. Our reading strategies are getting lots of practice in our whole class discussions. Eventually I will send home cards for the children to use at home. These cards will help you see what your child is thinking as they read. Cut the cards up and place one of each in front of you and your child. Read a passage together, stop at a predetermined point in the story, and pick up the card that corresponds with your thinking. Within the next week we will break into groups and begin to use the comprehension strategies in small, teacher guided groups, with the hopes that the students can use them on their own. We are also working constructed responses in our reading response journals. The students are answering questions and using the text to support their thinking. This takes practice and I am utilizing the gradual release method to guide them to completing this task independently. The students have listened to my though process along the way and I am formulating answers based on their feedback. Some students are giving it a try on their own already!

Math 

We are coming to the end of our geometry unit in math. We will complete the unit 1 post test on Tuesday. I will send home a study guide on Monday. The post test is made up of examples we have practiced in class and I'm confident that everyone will do great! We have practiced determining differences between shapes based on sides and angles, types of lines used to make the figures, and we also have practiced similar figures and congruency. Our next unit will be data, statistics, and probability. 

Writing 

We are finishing our All About Me stories. The students completed an editing activity and we review the revising process. Students will revise their own writing and then participate in peer editing. Once they have peer edited their writing, a teacher conference will take place before the final copy is written. Now that we have 6 computers working in our classroom, we will put them to good use to publish pieces. If you have not sent in a USB drive for classroom use, now will be the time to do so. We no longer have a computer lab, so not every student will get to publish every piece. What I don't want to see is students rushing through the writing process to get to a computer.  If I start to see students skipping parts of the writing process or rushing through their work, I may not allow them on the computers for that piece.

Social Studies/Science

Our continents and oceans test were wonderful. We are working on latitude, longitude, and the compass rose. We will begin science the first week in October. Our rocks and minerals kit has come in and preparations are being made for our first investigation. 

Miscellaneous 

• Our first breakfast club will be held Friday October 7th. I will have muffins and juice available to those students who have completed all their homework for the month of September.  Look for the invitation to come home sometime next week.

• NECAP reading is October 4-6th. Math NECAP is October 11-13th. Please make sure your child has had a good breakfast and plenty of sleep. I will limit homework to just reading and math logs during NECAP, no spelling homework will be given. 

• There is no school this Wednesday for professional development, and on Thursday for the holiday

• There will be school on parent teacher conference days (November and April) we have not been notified as to how conferences will be made up as of now. I hope everyone enjoys the weekend!

• Feel free to leave a comment!

Mrs. Kiernan's 4th grade Rocks!!