What a busy and exciting week! The fourth graders were beyond thrilled to reunite with their kindergarten buddies. They shared picture books and illustrated their favorite scenes from the book together. These relationships are so heartwarming to witness.
The third and fourth graders worked diligently to decorate and personalize their writer’s notebooks. They included photographs, words, magazine pictures and stickers. We will be using these journals all year during writing.
The two classes also collaborated to research some fascinating facts about owls. Do you know what owls eat? Do you know what the largest type of owl is called? Ask your child for the answers.
Speaking of animals, the fourth graders wrote lovely tributes to our beloved bearded dragon, Gili. These will be buried with Gili in his final resting place. The students also used the design thinking model to brainstorm ideas of what to do with Gizmo in an emergency situation. We posed the question:
How might we take care of Gizmo if an emergency happened at JCDS?
You can check out their responses on our design thinking bulletin board. They are a resourceful bunch! They also researched animals to adopt for a new class pet. They are using their research to write a persuasive essay to convince us to purchase an additional pet for the classroom. (I am secretly hoping it is not a snake:) We will keep you posted…..
In math, we are continuing to study place value, rounding numbers and estimating. We also practiced the Singapore Math bar modeling method to solve word problems. If your child ever struggles with math homework, please write me a note. Homework is never graded, it is only based on effort. The kids also experimented with splash math on the ipads.
We are more than half way through our class novel, The Lemonade War. The children are thoroughly engrossed in the story and they learned many business terms such as underselling and entrepreneur. I am sending home the reading responses in the Friday folders. The children are learning how to restate questions in the answer and how to provide text evidence and examples.
Finally, we are so excited to see all of you at school for the parent breakfast on Tuesday, Sept 23rd and at Open House on Wednesday, October 1st. I also would love you to mark your calendars for Wednesday evening, December 3rd for the parent-student book talk. I will explain this in detail at Open House. Have a wonderful weekend.
Melissa