Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News
for the week of January 30, 2017
Due Dates / Upcoming Events
Monday, January 30 - reading logs due
Tuesday, January 31 - Home Link due
Wednesday, February 1 - early release
Thursday, February 2 - math journal pages: be all caught up
Friday, February 3 - SpellingCity activities due / Home Link due
Monday, February 6 - reading logs due
General News and Announcements
Progress Reports
Your child brought home an envelope that contains the progress report from the first semester of the school year. All grades are based on fourth grade standards and reflect your child’s achievement for the entire first half of the year. The format should look familiar to you from years at MIW, with the exception of the math grades. Also, your child is bringing home a packet of reading logs from October through last week. There’s a lot to be proud of in all those hours of at-home reading! Next week, I will offer a different logging format for kids who have regularly met or exceeded grade level expectations for at-home reading.
Looking for… the front and back panels of cereal boxes for an art project.
Academic Updates:
Reading Workshop
Our research continues! Your child has the choice of bringing home some work to do to fill in any gaps in her/his research. I especially encouraged those kids who have been absent and/or who are out of the room for a part of our reading workshop time. Here are three “kid-friendly” search engines:
Next week, I will do a mini-lesson about strategies to use when one finds conflicting information. This will ultimately lead to a discussion about thinking critically about reliable sources and how to determine what to believe when researching on the internet. I’ll also introduce the highly-anticipated Google Slides project!
Writing Workshop
This week, the kids worked hard to turn their pros and cons t-charts into well-crafted paragraphs explaining two sides of an issue or topic. We considered the criteria and fourth grade expectations for high quality work. The students helped me determine what aspects of this writing should be graded. Then, they reflected on their own paragraphs and color-coded their work to help see what criteria they actually included in their own work. Several students asked if they could then make some revisions to add parts they missed, so they’d earn a better grade -- and, more importantly to me, improve as writers! YES! We did all this to help build awareness of the importance of criteria, understand better how to use resources (assignment descriptions, criteria, checklists) to guide work and revision to make sure one is meeting or exceeding those expectations, and to clearly understand how one earns a grade.
Math
This week students started unit 5 in the fourth grade math program. This unit starts out with focusing on fractions, specifically adding and subtracting fractions and mixed numbers with like denominators. Students also revisited the important skill of multiplying 2-digit by 2-digit numbers by having an in-class snowball fight! The action is captured in this video. :)
Theme
With a chopped up week we only had a few opportunities to have theme this week. One of the activities earlier in the week was to investigate the answer to this question: Could a volcano erupt in your own backyard? After learning about the idea that volcanoes form in clusters that follow a linear pattern, students then plotted volcanoes on maps in four regions of the Earth. Putting their maps together they recognized a circular pattern of volcanoes in or near the Pacific Ocean - also known as The Ring of Fire! We feel pretty sure a volcano won’t be erupting in our backyards any time soon!
