Week of April 1

     Last week in reading I read students the book  Once Upon a Fairy Tale.   It takes several fairy tales and tells them through different character's point of view. For instance, in the story Little Red Riding Hood, I read them the story through the eyes of Little Red Riding Hood, LRRH's mother, the wolf, the woodcutter, and the granny.  I used this book to practice the skill of finding evidence from the text to draw conclusions. Students had to decide which character I was talking about and the evidence that they based their decision on. 

     Students have chosen new reading and writing goals for the last quarter.  I will share them with you at parent conference. Today we will be looking at calendars and planning if this is due here, then you need to start your project here, etc. The calendars will be in their binder. Feel free to ask them to show them to you and make a copy for the 'frig or your family calendar.

     One of the reading goals this quarter is to read a biography. We chose these from the library the week before. During silent reading students read their biography, took notes and then shared them with a partner.  Eventually, we will be writing a report and creating a puppet to share their report. 

    One of the mini lessons was on how to determine the meaning of a word if you don't know it.  Now when students put sticky notes on a word they don't know they are to use one of these strategies to find the meaning. The strategies we discussed are:
     -Using the context-read the words around it sometimes they tell you the meaning of a word
     - Substitute or guess a word
     -Use word parts to determine meaning (undoable-not able to do)
     -Greek/Latin roots (cardi=heart, a cardiologist is a heart doctor)
     -Use the dictionary
 
    In writing we have been typing the animal reports that we will give our buddies. One of the major focuses of this unit was writing a main idea and supporting it with details. They created a glossary with words they thought might be hard for their buddies,and made an illustration and wrote a caption. Students found and printed images. They did a dedication and an about the author page.  When they are all done, we will read and present them to our buddies. The fourth graders will also have their own copy so they can read them to you also.

    In social studies the students' final project for the Abenaki was to take all of the information from their binder and create a flipchart. Each section of the flipchart was a different category about the Abenaki. They wrote a paragraph about each category and illustrated it. These are in the hallway for you to see. We have one final activity that we will do this week. You'll hear more about that later.  Our next unit will be Vermont history.

     In math we have been learning how to round any number to tens, hundreds or thousands. They have a little poem in their math notebook to help them remember what to do. We have been learning how to do division with one digit divisors and what to do with the remainders. For instance, if the word problem was how many cars would they need to go on a trip and the answer was 14 R6 then they would need 15 cars but if the problem was how many lollipops would the each get then they would get 14.  We are also continuing to work on  the metric unit of measuring.