Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of March 27, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, April 3 - weekly reading logs are due / March reading calendar is due

Tuesday, April 4 - Home Link due  

Wednesday, April 5 - early release

Thursday, April 6 -  math journal pages due / ABL

Friday, April 7 -  SpellingCity activities due (plurals 1)  / Home Link due

Monday, April 10 - weekly reading logs are due

General News and Announcements

Potential Field Trip:

Please make note on your calendar for June 20th.  All fourth graders are scheduled to go to Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, NH.  If we have enough Mayberry and McFarland chaperones, we will plan for our classes to attend.  We’d like at least seven chaperones per class, and the more, the merrier!  We will send home a formal notice about the field trip in the coming weeks.  If you are available to chaperone, you can let us know now, and/or wait until that notice comes home.  It’s a super trip!

Watercolor Birds:

Both classes did some watercolor paintings of birds (thinking spring!).  See photos below.

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

Reading classes took a backseat to testing and other activities this past week.  Many students have been book shopping, trading in and taking out a variety of historical fiction chapter books.  Over the next two weeks, we will focus on World War II and the Holocaust.

Writing Workshop

Students wrote three big ideas about either “The Marble Champ” or Sebastian’s Roller Skates, and they are now working to create a strong thesis statement from one of those ideas.  This week, we will work hard to plan the literary essays and begin writing supporting idea paragraphs.

Math

This week students worked on how to interpret a remainder when solving division number stories. They discovered that they can show a remainder as a fraction, round the answer up to the nearest whole or ignore the remainder if it makes sense for the number story.  They also learned how to use a circle protractor to accurately measure angles.

Theme

Due to the MEA testing this week we decided to take a break from science and social studies. Stay tuned for some awesome stop-motion videos. I think there may be a few budding movie directors in our class!