In reading we completed The Great Yellowstone Fire with a quiz this week. We also began reading our first chapter book. To introduce our book we wrote about the many challenges that we face in life. Our story, Stone Fox, is about a challenge a little boy faces and how he works to overcome that challenge. We had fun creating a code for the classroom, which we are trying to use daily. Ask your child about how the code was used in our story. During ROAR we reviewed graphic organizers and nonfiction features. Please don't forget students need to be reading and responding at home. If you have questions about the home reading please let me know.
Students continued unit 2 in math, which was some review from previous years. We reviewed place value, addition, subtraction and rounding this week. We also found the landmarks in data. We learned about maximum (greatest number in data), minimum (least number in data), range (maximum - minimum), mode (most often or most frequent) and median (middle number, order numbers from largest to smallest and find the middle). We had a short quiz over these terms to see what we still needed to practice. The unit 2 math test will be next Tuesday. Students have a study guide in their homework helpers section of their INDIAN binder. Please take some time to review with your child. Students are confusing our new terms median, mode and range. These are terms they simply must memorize.
We finished our interviews with our classmates this week. Then we worked on main idea, details and concluding sentences when writing about all the interesting information that we learned. We also reviewed how to edit our writing. Hopefully, I will get our Meet the Class paragraphs posted on our website this weekend. We will be writing our first narrative (story) for a grade next week. Please notice that 4th grade language arts include grammar, spelling and writing.
Spelling tests came home this week with an explanation about grading. Don't forget to study the meaning of the words; many students struggled with the vocabulary portion of the test. If you have any questions about the grading of these tests please let me know. Also I have moved all spelling tests back one week due to the power outage. Our spelling test will be next week with the practice test on Thursday.
Happy !
Mrs. Stratton