Last week was hard. Especially last Friday. After a whole quarter of learning new things, we are all incredibly excited, but also a little tired. This is why Fall Break was invented. As we approach the break, remind your students to finish the race strong! Push through to the end and cross the finish line at their best pace. These last two weeks contain the promise of wonderful learning yet, and then we will get a week off to rest our minds and our souls and prepare for a brand new quarter. Each and every one of your students deserves a commendation for what they have accomplished these past nine weeks. Be sure to remind them how proud you are during their break! This WeekIn Spalding this week we will be filling in some rule pages, but still expect spalding homework to be coming. In English Language Arts we will be practicing our keyword outline and summary skills. Student progression in these skills will be tested next week. In Math we will continue working on factors and multiples. Factors are numbers that you can multiply together to make a product (another number). Keep reviewing this concept. Ask your students "We are buying 2 pizzas with 8 slices each...2 and 8 are both factors of what number?" Make it as concrete and as relevant as possible so your students have concrete experiences to connect with these ideas with in the future. In Literature we will be learning about Arthur and his knight's quest for the Holy Grail. The story starts to take many a tragic turn in these chapters, but also contains a lot of exciting adventures and excellent moral lessons. Keep asking your students what it means to be a good knight, and who their favorite knight is. They can learn a lot from the examples of King Arthur's court. In History we are reviewing all we have learned this quarter. The important arc we have been tracking is the transition from the Feudal system of government that arose in the wake of Rome's collapse to the beginnings of Representative Democracy that arose in England through the Magna Carta and parliament. The ideas and truths that were discovered in the 400 year period between Charlemagne's crowning as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 A.D. and the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 A.D. are those that would be held as "Self-Evident" in the American Declaration of Independence. In Science we will be diving into atoms and electricity! This is a very exciting unit, so expect a lot of excited stories to come home about static electricity and circuits! Upcoming Assessments
This WeekIn Spalding we will be jumping to list "P" because your scholars have demonstrated excellence in following the Spalding method to solve words. You should expect Spalding homework to come home on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night. The spelling test will be on Friday. In English Language Arts we will be reviewing all that we have learned about nouns and pronouns and also starting to write our own summaries, but in groups. This week we will be reading and summarizing an informational text about Leonardo Da Vinci. In Mathematics we are diving into the world of multiplication and division. We will be studying factors and multiples throughout the week, but we will have a quiz on Tuesday that only assesses student understanding of rounding and multiples. In Literature we will be reading about the exploits of Sir Gawain and then seminaring on what it is about him that makes him such a great knight. Be sure to ask your students what you think their opinion is and have them answer in complete sentences! In History we will be learning about the Magna Carta and the seeds of democratic government that would spring from it. Ask your students why the Magna Carta was written and why it is so important to the history of our own country. In Science we will be starting our unit on electricity! This is a super exciting unit that will involve a lot of projects. Your students should be bringing a few of those projects home in the coming weeks. Don't forget to ask them to explain to you how electricity works. The greatest gift we can give to our students is to let them, for a moment, be the teachers. Upcoming Assessments1, Math quiz on Tuesday that will go over rounding and finding multiples. 2. History test on Wednesday that will cover everything we have learned from Charlemagne to the Model parliament we will learn about today. 3. Spelling test on Friday on the 30 words we studied this week. 4. Seminar on Sir Gawain this Friday. Other announcementsWe have gone through a slight schedule shift in order to change how we teach science and history. Starting next week science and history will be taught alternatively every other day. In order to make this work we have moved science and history to the end of the day, and brought English Language Arts to the beginning of the day. This will not effect the content level of any of your students' other classes.
-The Battle of Hastings Dear Parents, We are officially more than half way through our first quarter as fourth graders. Even in that short amount of time, I have seen each of your scholars grow in both maturity and knowledge. I am incredibly excited for what this young group of learners will do in the coming weeks and months. The academic expectations of my fourth grade class are not easy, and may even be frustrating for many of your students. This is intentional, I want them to be a little bit frustrated, if only so they can learn to work through that frustration. Too often students breeze through elementary and even high school...only to freeze when they encounter the first difficult challenge that life throws at them as adults. It is better if they learn how to deal with those challenges in 4th grade, when the stakes are relatively low. If your student received a notice of academic deficiency this week, don't panic! There is plenty of time to bring up low grades. Focus on making sure your students are completing the homework coming home in their folders, and encourage them to write down any questions they have to bring to me if they do not understand what they are studying in class. Let me know if you have any questions! Best, Mr. Ohbayashi This Week.In Spalding we should be getting into the swing of our words this week. We will be doing about 10 words a day in list N. Expect Spalding homework to come home on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. In Literature we will be reading about the Knights of the Round Table and some of their most heroic adventures. Be sure to ask about how King Arthur survives the plots of his sister the sorceress Morgana le Fay, or how Gawain survives his encounter with the Green Knight! In Mathematics we are going to be playing with some big numbers, up to 100,000. This can be daunting for students, but remind them that they can think of each place value as its own small group. The digit 7 in the ten thousands place means you have seven ten thousands. Have them draw pictures of their ten thousands, so they can picture it as a real and concrete thing. Each place value is a concrete thing, and the more concretely students think about numbers, the easier they will be able to manipulate them. In History we will be learning about another would be English king, William the Conqueror. We will learn how his conquest in 1066 laid the foundation for much of the history that would eventually lead to the American Revolution. We will also learn about Henry II and his contributions to English law and history. In ELA we will be exploring the Relative Pronoun. Language is a vehicle that transfers and communicates meaning, and the relative pronoun allows us to connect descriptive clauses to nouns. This lets us talk not just about a hand, but a hand "that was burned." Relative pronouns are incredibly important to be able to write elegant and beautiful sentences. We will also continue practicing our summarization skills. Keep having your students orally summarize any story they encounter at home or at the movies! This repeated practice will make them elite summary writers in no time. Upcoming Assessments1. On Tuesday we will have an open note quiz on Nouns and Pronouns. Make sure you review the Personal and Relative pronouns with them Monday night!
2. On Thursday we will have a math test on place value and using operations to manipulate numbers up to 10,000. 3. On Friday we will have a Spalding spelling test and a History test on what we have learned so far in the Middle ages.
This Week.In Spalding we will be continuing in list N and will (finally) begin sending home Spalding homework assignments. These assignments require students to hear words dictated to them and write them down with rules three times. You will have a copy of the words to show them if they are correct or not. You NEED NOT know the rules, and if the students do not remember what rule is what, simply send them to school knowing to ask that question. Students will learn the rules through repeated experience, so you need not try to have them memorize them. In Literature we will be starting King Arthur, by Roger Lancelyn Green. This book will be provided by the school as a class set. They are a bit beat up from previous use, we are trying to make them last one more year so please help your students take care of them. Arthur is a difficult read for many students, and every student would benefit from reading their assignments with a parent. Feel free to help them understand what their focus questions are asking if you notice their answers don't make sense based on the question. In Math we will be learning place value up to 1,000,000. Understanding place value is fundamental to being comfortable with math. The value of the digit in the tens place in the number 245 is not 4, but 4 tens. When students internalize this principle they begin to read numbers much more easily and many simple mistakes are avoided. Insist that your students describe numbers that you encounter in your every day life. Simply asking a question like "It is 110 degrees outside, how many hundreds are there in that number?" will begin to make place value a concrete concept in their minds. In History we will be learning about the birth of the Feudal system and the rise of kings like Charlemagne from the ashes of Rome. Feudalism is the system of government that dominated Europe for the better part of a thousand years, and it was the egg within which ideas about modern liberty and freedom were hatched. Be sure to ask your student about what they are learning in history class, I am sure they will have a lot to teach you. In ELA we will be learning more about pronouns. There are many different kinds of pronouns, who knew that such a simple part of speech could be so diverse? This week we will be learning about personal pronouns. I, she, we, he, they, and you. If you see any of those make sure you have your student identify they! We will also be practicing summarizing and outlining a story that they have read. The skill of summarization is fundamental to learning how to write expository and persuasive essays. Make sure you have your students practice summarizing their days or a movie that they have seen. Always expect them to be able to tell you about main characters and what happened in the story, and make sure they always use complete sentences. This verbal exercise will help improve their skills on written summarizations. Upcoming Assessments1. Pronouns Quiz on Friday (the 8th)
2. Place Value Quiz on Friday (the 8th) 3. Spelling test on Friday (the 8th) |
AuthorBurk Ohbayashi is a husband, a father, and an educator. Archives
March 2018
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