McFarland-Mayberry-Begley Bulletin

for the week of April 4-8, 2016

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, April 11th - Weekly reading logs due / Matchbox Diaries due

Tuesday, April 12th - Home link due

Wednesday, April 13th - Full Day Wednesday

Thursday, April 14th -  Spelling due

Friday, April 15th - No School: start of April Vacation!

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

We have two projects going on simultaneously this week and next.  First, the kids are working on their Matchbox Diary boxes.  They started the plans and decorating the boxes in class this week, and they have a purple project description sheet with details.  This is due on Monday, all finished.  If anyone wants to chip in to help defray the cost of the boxes, I’d be grateful, but don’t feel obligated.  It was $16.00 for both classes.  The second project is a brochure of a historical fiction short text.  They’ll use the brochure to prepare for a book club meeting.  This work will be done in class, unless they need to finish up next week.  After vacation, we will start focusing on social issues in books.

Writing Workshop

I hope your writer leaves fourth grade understanding (and truly believing...though that might be a stretch) that taking the time upfront to plan a writing piece has an enormous impact on the strength of the piece.  Well, even if they don’t believe it, they’re getting plenty of practice!  We have used a couple different graphic organizers to record our ideas about the story elements for our historical fiction stories (character, plot, setting), and now we’ve almost finished story mountains to complete the planning process.  Next week, we will draft the stories, with mini-lessons about resolution scenes, summarizing vs. storytelling, and using small setting details to show the time period and to create a mood (that’s the advanced option).  Soon after vacation, we’ll start reading and writing lots of poetry!

Math

Unit 6 is behind us as students took the end of unit assessment on Thursday and Friday. Next week we will do some review work and tighten up on a few loose skills. After vacation it will be time to jump right in with unit 7.

Spelling

This week we worked on synonyms and prefixes.

Theme

Students worked hard to finish their landform projects this week.  As I mentioned in parent-teacher conferences, students assessed their states projects with me and then assessed themselves on the landform project.  I did check their work (and noted where I disagreed if I felt it was inaccurate), but on the whole, they were right on!  On Friday most classes had an opportunity to display their projects for their homeroom class and do a museum walk.  This project has been a great celebration of our individual strengths and talents and the kids have been able to see there’s more than one path to learning.