We enter our fourth week of learning this Monday, and your students are beginning to become comfortable with the pace and rhythm of the classroom. The expectations they have begun to set for themselves are high, and they are beginning to see the rewards of those expectations. This week your students will begin to learn how to seminar. This is a difficult skill, as it requires not just having something to say, but also begin able to listen to what is being said by others. The best way to help develop their ability to do this is to begin (if you haven't already) to engage them in discussions about things that really matter. Ask for their opinions and show them what it looks like to thoughtfully consider them. The topics of these discussions should of course vary based on what each parent feels is important and appropriate to discuss with their fourth grader, but yours will be their best example of how to engage in fruitful conversation about what is True, and Good, and Beautiful. This Week:In Spalding this week we will be starting list N in the Spalding blue book. Please make sure your students have this book as it is absolutely necessary to the curriculum. If your student is new to Spalding, or just rusty with the phonograms, please be reviewing them for about 10 minutes a night. I am told there is a Spalding Phonograms app that can be found in the app store on i-phones. I am unsure about Android. There will be a spelling test on Friday. In Literature we will be discussing our seminar questions all week and having our Seminar on Friday. Students will be assessed on how well they answer the questions, but also on how well they foster a group conversation. If you want to help them get better at this skill, foster such conversations at home. Teach them what it looks like to listen and respond respectfully to points being made, even if you don't one hundred percent agree with them. In Science we will be finishing our review of the scientific method and conducting our first experiments! We will be looking and experimenting to find how many times you can fold a piece of paper in half and the effect of a penny being flung around the inside of a balloon. Your students will learn that experiments should be precisely measurable and repeatable in order for us to be sure that their results are reliable. In Math we will be doing a whirlwind review of long division and fractions. Most of the content that we cover this week should be that which your students have seen before, but it will be the most challenging content that they would have experience with. Long division can be scary for fourth graders, so we will make sure that we note any students that are having trouble and be working with them to create comfort and familiarity with splitting wholes up into equal parts. This will of course lead us straight to fractions, another area of math that seems difficult but is actually quite simple when you understand it. There is basically only one concept in fractions that you and your students need to drill: When you split a whole into equal parts, you can name the parts. Everything else is a convention. Keep this in mind when trying to deal with difficult problems. In ELA we will be reading and summarizing stories together as a class. This is the first step in learning how to compose clear and excellent summaries; an important skill for both reading comprehension and writing. A great way to help students become better at this skill is to have them summarize movies or stories you are encountering at home in complete sentences. This can be spoken, and can follow the format of "What happened first? What happened next? What happened last?" Upcoming Assessments1. Spelling test on Friday. 2. Literature Seminar on Friday. 3. Scientific Method quiz on Friday. 4. Math test on Friday. Other AnnouncementsRemember that this Tuesday is our first PSO family night at Peter Piper Pizza. It will be at the location on Dysart and will be a lot of fun! Check the Chronicles for more details.
Another thing to look out for are Deficiency Notices coming out next week. This is our way to let you know if your student is struggling to meet their academic goals for the quarter. A deficiency notice is not a death sentence for the quarter and can be quickly remedied with focused determination on the part of your student. If you receive one, make sure you are working with them nightly to get their homework done, and please feel free to email me with any questions you have about how to best help them. Comments are closed.
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AuthorBurk Ohbayashi is a husband, a father, and an educator. Archives
March 2018
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