Spelling

The last few weeks, I have noticed that our spelling scores have been getting lower. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time to spend on studying for spelling during the school day so that task is done most often at home. Mrs. Mango found a great site to aid in studying for spelling that I would like to share with you. The address is: http://www.spellingcity.com. Please use this site to help your child increase their spelling scores.

Razorback Pumpkin

I wanted to thank Emi for the wonderful pumpkin she made for our class pumpkin at the school carnival!! The Arkansas Razorbacks are my favorite team so I was very excited to see a Razorback Pumpkin!!! Thank you so much Emi!!

Math Videos

I am writing a quick post to make you aware of a great website with videos that show some of the different strategies that we are using in math. It is from the Shultz math center that is a school that also uses the math Investigations series. The web address is: http://www.schultzcenter.org/mathvideos.shtml.

The kids are doing a great job of breaking down or decomposing to solve their multiplication problems. I realize that many of them could very easily do the traditional algorithms to solve the problems that we are currently solving but we are working to build them up to more difficult problems. The strategies that we are teaching them now are much more efficient and accurate. I ask that you please help the students to stick to these new strategies and not to focus on the traditional algorithms. Thank you so much!!!

Higher Thinking

A big part of our fourth grade year is working on higher thinking and digging deep for answers. We begin working on this by doing the Weekly Readers on a regular basis with extended questions. The past couple of weeks, I have been working with my class on not just giving the quick off the top of your head answer but actually digging deep for the answers and finding prove for the answer choices. This week's Friday Folder will include last week's Weekly Reader. Many of the grades are not what we would want to see from these students. There were many that did not meet that passing standard that should have. A great majority of these students were finished with the Weekly Reader very quickly and although, I stressed to them how afraid I was that they had done them too quickly, they would not go back and read through and prove the answers. I discussed this with them when I gave the graded papers back to them to file for the Friday Folders. I ask that parents encourage your child to find the proof for the answer and really dig into the story. They have the opportunity to correct the assignment for a higher grade. It is very important that we work on deeper thinking in preparation for the spring TAKS test.

Math Unit 1

First of all, I want to say thank you to all those that came out for our first IB/Math night. I hope that you now have a much better understanding of where we are going with things and why we are doing things the way that we are in math. Mr. Rich would be a fabulous person to talk to if you still have questions or were unable to make it out tonight. He would be more than happy to sit down and talk with you and show you some examples of what we are doing.

I do want to say, the majority of the kids are really getting what we are doing. We finished up unit 1 today with the district End of Unit Assessment and then the programs End of Unit performance assessment. Most of the kids did really well. By looking at their work, I was really able to see their thinking and how they are understanding all of this. The performance assessment really showed their thinking. Let me give an example, let's say the kids were asked to solve 9 x 9. One of the ways that the students solved it was by finding 9x10 and then taking 9 away from that to get 81. They are learning how to use the math combinations (we don't call them facts any longer) they KNOW to solve the combinations that they do not know. Throughout this unit we have talked a lot about arrays, products, factors, square numbers, and multiples. Ask your child about these words and have them show you what they are. It isn't enough to just know a definition, the kids need to be able to know what that means and how it looks.

We will be starting Unit 2 tomorrow and moving away from multiplication in the classroom for a couple of weeks. We do encourage you to continue to work on those unknown combinations at home because we will be coming back to that in Unit 3. Unit 2 involves graphing and surveying so many different math concepts come out during this unit. We will continue the Friday quizzes to make sure the kids are staying up to date on what we have done so far and not letting things go just because we may not be focusing on it in class.

We will continue to work with those that are not quite getting it to help them to catch up. I have spend some one on one time with several students as well as has Mr. Jerome when he is in our room. We will be starting tutoring up in a few weeks so several of our students will have the opportunity to participate in that. I will be contacting you via email or letters home to let you know if we would like to have your child involved. Thank you so much for all you do!!

IB/Math night

Just a quick post to remind everyone of the IB/Math night tomorrow night. Ms. Langston will spend thirty minutes going over our IB program and how it works in our school. Mr. Rich will spend thirty minutes going over our new math program. This is a great opportunity to gain a better understanding of both the IB program at Las Colinas as well as the new math program. The presentation will start tomorrow night at 6:30 and go until 7:30. We are planning to have these nights periodically throughout the year. I encourage you to all come out for these nights. It will help you to gain a better understanding as to how your children are being educated this year. We do ask that you not bring your children to these nights as it is a time for you to learn about what they are learning. We thank you so much for this and look forward to seeing you tomorrow night!

First IB Unit

I am very excited to say that we started our first IB unit of inquiry today. Our Central Idea for the unit is: The process of discovery can lead to inventions that impact our society. We will spend the next few weeks researching this and doing different activities to give us a better understanding to this BIG idea. We want the kids to start being curious about the things around them. They may start wondering why certain things were invented, what has been done to make them better, how are they useful, etc.

Through this unit, we will be working on both Thinking Skills and Communication Skills. I think the one that might require the most thought would be non-verbal communication. Many times, we think about how we communicate by listening, speaking, reading and writing but we don't think about the way we communicate non verbally. As a class, we will think about how our body language, facial expressions, etc. communicate with others.

End of the 2nd Week

Happy Friday to all!! We have now completed our second week of school. So far everything seems to be going well. We have been busy getting procedural things done but are quickly getting into the day to day that will continue throughout the year. After the first two weeks, there are a few things that enter my mind.

1. Homework: Every year I hear from many parents how much homework their fourth grade student seems to be getting. I look every year to see what can be done to trim this down so that they are not spending so much time at home doing homework. A certain amount is good, but I agree that kids need time to play and do extracurricular activities. I am working to try to make this a bit easier. There are certain things that are assigned weekly that must stay: Spelling Activities, Geography and starting next week, 15 minutes of reading. Those three are all assigned on Monday but not due until either Thursday (Geography) or Friday (Spelling and Reading). This helps with pacing. Math homework will be given most nights but it seems to be a lot quicker this year. Other than studying, most everything else is work not completed in class. I feel like, as the year progresses and we get more into routine, more work will be completed during classtime. One of our Classroom Essential Agreements is: I will use my time wisely. We will work during the school day to follow this agreement and learn how we can best use manage our time to get the things done that need to be done. I highly recommend doing this at home as well. Timers are good to be set and work within those timelines but please be cautious because we don't want to decrease the quality of work by rushing faster than we need to get something finished. I am noticing that my detention students are typically the same ones from day to day. I have given them this week to get into routine and hopefully fix this before next week. After that, I will be talking with them and contacting the parents to let them know that a habit is being formed. I appreciate all the help that parents do in getting this habit under control. I hope that we can work together to help make homework more managable for our students.

2. Math We have now completed a week of our new math program. It has been really exciting in class to see the students learn new ways of understanding math. We have had several "ah ha" moments together and had some interesting ways of solving problems shared with the class. I look forward to many more of these opportunities throughout the year. I thank the parents so much for their patience with helping the students with ways of solving math problems that they themselves may not be comfortable with. The Student Math Handbook is now available online to help with more difficult ideas. The website is: http://www.pearsonsuccessnet.com. To log on, my classroom is set up with their Cafeteria Numbers as their User Names and abc123 as the password. It is case sensitive so be careful with that. Mr. Rich's blog located on the LCE website is also another great resource for help with the math program at home.

3. Parents This being my 3rd year at LCE, I am realizing more and more how wonderful our parents are. I spent three years at a school that did not have the parental involvement that we are so fortunate to have here at LCE. I just want to thank all the parents for all they do to help their child's school years to be the best years possible. Many of you have spent hours these last few weeks cutting different things. After spending a few hours cutting myself, this means even more to me that parents are willing to help take on that task and get it accomplished. Thank you for all you do.

I realize this is a bit of a lengthy post but I felt the need to write about a few things that have been on my mind today. There are a few more but I will leave you with these for now. Have a great weekend with your children, and I look forward to seeing them on Monday morning!

Parent Night

I just wanted to say thank you to all the parents that came out tonight for our parent orientation. I hope that you were able to get some useful information about your child's 4th grade year. It is an exciting year but a very busy year. I look forward to getting to know each of you at the same time as your children.
For those that were not able to make it, I hope to see you later on in the year. I will be sending home a packet of info that was covered tonight.
If you have any questions, feel free to email or call. I will do my best to answer all questions or direct you to the person that can best answer the question.

Welcome to Fourth Grade

Welcome to the blog for room 301. This will be a place for our class to post different things. I will be posting periodically about things that are going on in the classroom. I am also hoping to give the students the opportunity to blog as well. It may be part of this blog or it may be a separate blog that will be linked to this one. Please check back periodically. The goal will be to update the blog regularly.

Thank you!

Ms. Moore