No new assignments coming home this week, but if your child has any work that is overdue, please be sure he or she gets that in as soon as possible.
I will send home some easy Thanksgiving extra credit work for students who want to do it.
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Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone! I hope you enjoy the time with your family and friends this week! No new assignments coming home this week, but if your child has any work that is overdue, please be sure he or she gets that in as soon as possible. I will send home some easy Thanksgiving extra credit work for students who want to do it.
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Hello Everyone!
Last week was kinda crazy! No school last Monday, one day of teaching and then Benchmarks! Friday I had to be out unexpectedly with a sick little girl. What a crazy week! This week, though it is a full five days, we will have more benchmark tests. We have Math on Wednesday and Reading on Thursday. Students who are absent on benchmark days will need to make it up upon return. The writing benchmarks are over now. I am just beginning to look through the narratives and expositories the students wrote. I'm not expecting perfection, of course. We have had practice writing one of each in class prior to the test. This is a chance for me to see where each student is in his or her abilitiy to read a prompt, plan for writing, write a rough draft, revise and edit, and then write a final copy. Some students are well on their way to a full understanding of the writing process. I am not able to send the benchmarks home. I am only able to show you what your child did in person. Let me know if you want to make an appointment to come see this. We will be using the examples written by all the students (names removed of course) to analyze and determine what could be done differently to improve the writing. Throughout the year we will do plenty of practice writing to a prompt. I prefer to do the majority of the work IN class, because I have to know where the students are and what needs they have without support at home. You will get a chance to see some of their work as I send graded practices home throughout the rest of the year. This week in Language Arts we are NOT doing writing stations. We are going to make some changes to station before beginning them again after the Thanksgiving break. In the meantime, we are working on revising and editing in large and small groups. No new spelling rules will be introduced this week, but we will continue to work on suffixes and their meanings. In Social Studies we learned about the Spanish eplorers who came through Texas. Now we are learning about a French explorer named La Salle. His ship, the La Belle, is being built at the Bob Bullock museum right now. This is an open exhibit, meaning you can watch it being assembled. I will be showing the students two short videos tomorrow about how the wreckage was discovered and how it was transported here to Austin. Pretty cool!! Please see my Upcoming Dates for anything coming up. Have a great week! I hope you all had a nice weekend. The weather was beautiful, but my sinuses didn't agree! Anyone else's allergies going crazy?!? This week we honor our veterans. Tomorrow the kids have off of school. Hopefully you do too so you can spend it together. If you have any stories of veterans in your family, tomorrow is a great day to share those with your kids. Personally, my favorite serviceman was my dad who served in the Navy during the Korean War on the SS Bottineau. When the students return on Wedneday, our schedules will be a little different. I've told all the classes this, but just in case someone didn't "hear" me, we will have special areas at 8:30 on those two days rather than 9:15. That way, once we return, we have a 2 hour, uninterrupted block of time for them to take the Writing Benchmark. It's broken into two days, 2 hours each day. Benchmarks are given to allow us to see what areas we need to dig a little deeper with students throughout the year. On Friday, I promised them we would NOT be working on the expository piece we are almost finished with, because I think they'll need a break. I'm planning on doing some social studies activities instead. For benchmark testing, students should bring a jacket or sweater in case they get cold from just sitting for so long. They can always fold it up and make a cushion to sit on when they're not cold. Snacks and water bottles are fine for both days, just nothing that's messy or requires a spoon. In Social Studies, we have learned about 4 Spanish explorers so far who have explored Texas. We started our timeline for this newest section of Texas History. In Writing, when we aren't working on as a whole group on expositories, we are working in stations. One of our stations has been a letter-writing station. We are beginning to get some responses. Check out Avery's keepsakes she received from the new Longhorn football coach! Have a wonderful week, Everyone!
Hello, Parents! I hope you all had a fun Halloween together. At least it was a Friday, and you gained an hour on Saturday. It really made the whole event more acceptable, didn't it?
We are fully into our second nine weeks. This is just a reminder that when you see low grades on the parent portal, ask your child about them. We generally send graded work on Fridays in the Cardinal folder. Any failing grade can ALWAYS be corrected and returned for a higher grade. If you see "MSG" under an assignment column, it means that for now it has not been turned in. It averages in as a zero until the assignment is added. Your child should be showing his/her agenda each day so that you can see what we are working on. Homework should be recorded and highlighted. If your child is not doing this, he/she is not following the directions and expectations of fourth grade. In Language Arts we are continuing on our expository pieces. We are really working on catchy beginnings right now. We did more practice on this in the computer lab today. Soon, I will be introducing Google Docs, so that students may work on assignments at home or at school and not lose the progress they've made. This week we are working with words that have suffixes in spelling. Most of our practice is in class. Work only goes home when a student doesn't finish in-class work due to being off task. Any other homework, which I give very little, is documented in the agenda. In Social Studies we are learning about explorers who came to Texas. You should have recieved an open notes quiz over regions and Native Americans. Students who scored below a 70 were asked to write or type out corrections in complete sentences. Partial corrections or corrections written right onto the paper will not be accepted. Tomorrow, Election Day, we are diverging from explorers to learn about an African American woman from Houston, Christia Adair, who had a hand in working for women's suffrage. The first benchmarks are next week. Next week will be crazy. School on Monday, students off on Tuesday, benchmarks on Wednesday and Thursday (writing), and then Friday. Ugh! None of us like this time of year. Please don't worry about these first benchmarks. They really are a gauge for us to see what gaps there are in learning before we get too much further into the year. Have a great week! |
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May 2019
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