Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of June 5, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, June 12 - 4th Grade Musical 5:50-6:30 p.m. (see info below) / weekly reading logs are due

Tuesday, June 13 - iReady Reading Testing 9:00-10:15-ish

Wednesday, June 14 - Step-Up Day (see note below) / McF’s have P.E. (sneakers)

Thursday, June 15 -   iReady Math Testing 9:00-10:15-ish / math journal pages due

Friday, June 16 -  

Monday, June 19 - 4th Grade Activity Swap

General News and Announcements

A 4th Grade Musical!

Please save the date of Monday, June 12th (5:50-6:30) when the entire fourth grade class performs for their first and only time on stage together until their Greely High School Graduation ceremony in 2025!

Students have been learning a variety of friendship-themed songs in their music classes this spring and will be ready to perform for families soon!  

Please have your child meet her/his classroom teacher in the cafeteria at 5:50 to warm up.  If you arrive earlier, please keep your child with you until then.  Please make sure your child is all cute, wearing a white top and dark bottoms (pants, shorts, skirt…).  Consider that it might get hot in the gym!  See you there!

Bucket Slip Celebration:

Students have earned 350 bucket slips!

Tuesday will be Luau Day!

You are invited to wear your best tropical outfits …

wild print shirts, sunglasses, leis, grass skirts, etc.

Step-Up Day

On Wednesday, students will meet their fifth-grade teachers and see who’s in their classes for next year.  They’ll spend a half-hour or so in their new groupings.  As you know, this can be a rather intense event for students.  We encourage the kids to understand that change and transition can create lots of normal feelings!  Sometimes those feelings are uncomfortable, and there might be a tendency to want to try to “fix” that immediately.  With time and positive encouragement, the vast majority of those feelings are resolved on their own.

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

The kids have taken a hiatus on regular reading time this week!  We’ve been making gorgeous bookmarks to give to incoming 4th graders on Step-Up Day next Wednesday.  Mrs. Campbell, our literacy specialist, is also working with us to get us started on IXL English/Language Arts, just to check it out.

Writing Workshop

We have focused on finishing up color poems for a class anthology.  A specific focus has been line breaks this week.  Students often ask, “How does a writer know when to end a line?” so we worked on that intensely this week.  Here’s the chart students have in their notebooks now:

Line Breaks: reasons poets end lines where they do

Poets end lines…

…on a strong word

…so the last word will rhyme with  the last work on the next line

…at a natural pause

…to replace a comma or period

…to stress the last word so it sounds more powerful

…to follow a format

…to make the final word more noticeable

…to slow down the pace of the reader

Math

This week in math we tackled a few of the unit 8 lessons that fourth grade teachers feel are the most important lessons to get in before the end of the school year. Students worked on a lot of multi-step number stories and their perseverance really blossomed with these problems. Some of the problems required 3, 4 and even 5 steps to complete!

    On Friday students got to use their fidget spinners! They used their spinners for a  data collection activity and then determine data points within the composite set of class data. They also worked on their math fact recall by giving their spinner a good spin and then trying to answer as many problems as possible before the spinner stopped. Lots of smiles and laughter in math today!

Theme

We have been using our theme time this week prepping letters to incoming fourth graders and decorating envelopes for the step-up packets. Yup, step-up day is almost here!