Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of April 3, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, April 10 - weekly reading logs are due

Tuesday, April 11 - Home Link due  

Wednesday, April 12 - full day, no early release

Thursday, April 13 -  math journal pages due / ABL

Friday, April 16 -  No school

Monday, April 24 - 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!

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

We have read the book Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust by Eve Bunting.  Mrs. Mayberry has been working with both classes on building background knowledge about WWII and the Holocaust during theme time.  She is also reading the book, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, as a read aloud to both classes.  As you can imagine (and are maybe experiencing for yourselves at home), the students are asking lots of thoughtful questions.  Many students are disgusted by Hitler.  A common question kids ask about just about any time period is, “Why didn’t they just---?!”  Fill in the blank:

• “...say, ‘No!”
• “...refuse to do it?”
• “...help each other?”

These are such good questions, as long as we understand that there are truly answers to these questions.  One of my favorite answers is, “Some people did!” and we are fortunate enough to have a variety of stories about people who did say “No,” who refused, and who helped each other.  We read The Yellow Star: The Legend of King Christian X of Denmark.  Please ask your child about that story and its powerful message of sticking together.

Writing Workshop

We worked long and hard this week writing boxes and bullets plans for our literary essays.  It was worth the time, though, because having a strong thesis statement and having three supporting ideas that we’ve analyzed and evaluated are essential to building a successful essay.  

    A number of students were able to apply to their own writing the concepts and practice from mini-lessons and our whole-class work.  But others weren’t able to do that yet.  I wanted to make sure every student got feedback and help, so I created a reflection process where students met with a peer to analyze their work thus far, and create their own plans for same-day revision.  Thank you to Cora and Grace for being my partners as we demonstrated this work for the writing classes!  It’s taking longer than anticipated to get going on the actual essay, but we’ll get there, and we’ll have a solid foundation on which to begin next week!

Math

This week students continued to hone their skills with angle measurements, partial quotient division, interpreting remainders in a number story and revisited adding and subtracting mixed numbers.

Theme

This week we finished up our stop-motion videos. Here is the link for your viewing enjoyment: https://youtu.be/9BxG-zMNth8