December+5,+2011

Dear Grade 4 Parents; December 4, 2011

It has been a couple of weeks or so since I posted a newsletter, mostly due to writing report cards and conducting Parent Conferences, but now everyone is caught up and I’ll let you know what is new in our Grade 4 Stars classroom!

Students will take a look at various kinds of advertising, to whom the audience is intended, ways in which commercial and advertising people get the message across, and how we can go about creating an advertising commercial for our school, WIS. I will try hard to keep you “in the know,” so if any of you have something to contribute to our efficiency, please do so!
 * //UNIT OF INQUIRY #3: //****How We Express Ourselves **through advertising

It will be very important for you to check out the Unit of Inquiry information on our Grade4Stars wiki site. We will visit the Wroclaw TV Station for our field trip.


 * //MATH: //**We’ve begun our new unit on NUMBERS and have already worked on large number place value, number terminology (like factor X factor = product), Least Common Multiple, and most recently have begun Greatest Common Factor. This part can get more confusing, so we’ll spend more time on it to come. We will concentrate on rounding up and down (estimating) for adding and subtracting along with adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers. Some students can do this quicker, but that’s not a problem since there’s plenty more to learn! We will also be re-visiting graphing with minimum, maximum, range, median, mode and mean (average). We will be having this unit test by next week before we take vacation.


 * //LANGUAGE ARTS: //**Since the Unit of Inquiry will require students to work in groups, create scripts and concentrate on their commercial, I will use this time to practice writing their first official five paragraph essay during Language Arts time. They will brainstorm, organize using a web and outline, draft, rewrite, and create a very nice essay about “My favorite place to visit.” You can help by helping them remember the details about this place. You may visit Ms. Lundin’s parent workshop on the wiki for details, or spend time in front of our staircase bulletin board about the writing process. The students will not only write the “who, what, when, where, why, and how’s,” but use the five senses and their sense of emotion to get the full experience down on paper. They will concentrate on including transitional words (ask them), coordinating conjunctions, and subordinating conjunctions. All this means they’ll be writing longer, better sentences! They will also learn to edit each other’s work which is a vital part of learning what should be included or not included in this kind of narrative paper.

3rd and 4th Grade Physical Education

Students recently finished their Soccer unit and have just started their basketball unit. During this unit they will learn, practice and improve their dribbling and passing skills. They will also have the opportunity to be part of the assessment process through a peer-assessment task. If you would like to know more about the basketball unit as well as see some videos from their final assessment task of the Soccer unit please go to the link below on the WIS PE wiki page:

http://wis-pe.wikispaces.com/3rd+and+4th+Grade