Monday Memo
(Tuesday) September 6, 2011
Dear Parents,
I hope everyone had a great, relaxing, long weekend!! We were busy last week! I think the students have finally started settling into the 4th grade routine and I know this is going to be an awesome week! We had our pictures taken last week as well. They looked so awesome with their nice clothes onJ Just a reminder that the book order is due this week (the 10th).
For reading this week, we are going to be reading about the Titanic. The students have looked ahead and have seen that this was going to be their next story and are so excited!! It is a great story and a great piece of non fiction for the kids! We will be working on a lot of skills this week . Some of them are: Comprehension, vocabulary, syllabication, outlining, and writing complete sentences. For grammar, we are starting on compound sentences. Our spelling words this week have the sounds of u. The list is attached to this memo. Our centers this week include a vocabulary center, computer keyboarding center, a language review sheet and making a poster about the Titanic. I have given all of the students a Judy Blume book that is at their lexile level. That is the book they are to read 15 minutes a night and then test on. They also have library books that they can read at their leisure as well. I would like the Judy Blume book finished by the middle of September. Thanks for your help with that!
Math this week has us working on rounding greater numbers, problem solving, reviewing what we have learned so far in our first chapter and understanding the dollar sign and decimal point. We are going to really get after those multiplication facts this week as well. Having them work at least 10 minutes a night on them, is such a great help! We are also doing our daily reviews that I call our “buckets”. This is something that is a great help to them in reviewing previously learned material. It is great for our ITBS tests as well!
Social Studies has had us doing some awesome things on the prometheon board. We have been working on the skills of using a map, understanding globes, looking at different kinds of maps and this week we are going to work on elevation maps, landform maps, and physical maps. We do some really need daily oral geography activities to reinforce what we learned the time before. The games are another way we reinforce what we have read about, in a fun way!
In Science, we are finishing up on our first unit of animal classification. Ask your child to name the 5 kingdoms all living creatures are divided into. We have done some cool prometheon board activities over the concept of classification. We did a fun shoe activity as well over ways to classify shoes. Each science day we begin our lesson with a daily oral science lesson. Last week we worked on decomposers and bacteria. This week it is answering the question “How do bacteria create cavities?”. These are fun daily tasks to reinforce some important science concepts that are found on the ITBS.
Tuesday is library day at 3:00, if you want to make sure your child brings back their library books on that day.
As always, any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me!
Have a great week!
Chris Mallen
Phone: (Home) 444-3093 (School) 444-4300 ext 336
