Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of September 3, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, September 11: reading logs due for those who participate in the regular classroom / writing notebook covers are due / Parent Information Night (details below)

Tuesday, September 12: Home Link due / McFarlands have P.E. (wear sneakers) / iReady reading testing in the afternoon

Wednesday, September 13: early release

Thursday, September 14: be caught up on math journal pages / iReady math testing in the afternoon

Friday, September 15: Home Link due

Monday, September 18: reading logs due

General News and Announcements

Parent Information Night at GMS ⅘: Monday, September 11, 5:30-7:00

Please meet Mrs. MacArthur in the gym at 5:30, and then make your way to Mrs. Mayberry’s room upstairs for our presentation about your child’s 4th grade year.  If you cannot be there, we will send home some paperwork with your child by the end of next week.  This event is for adults only; please make plans accordingly.  We look forward to seeing you!

Reading Logs

I’ll discuss this more in detail on Monday night, but for now, please make sure your child has read and logged outside of the school day on four different days (to establish a habit), for at least 25 minutes per session (for stamina).  If s/he hasn’t done this yet, there’s still time: tonight (Friday), Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning before school!  *Please note that if your child has her/his reading instruction in the resource room, their expectations may be different.

Volunteer needs

Mrs. McFarland is looking for a handful of parent volunteers to attach those fabulous writing notebook covers to the kids’ notebooks.  This is typically done overnight at volunteers’ homes, but it can be done here at school as well.  Volunteers can pick up notebooks and covers at the end of a school day (preferably Tuesday) and then drop off the notebooks the following day before school (Wednesday?).  I’ll supply the materials.  I also need a volunteer to laminate these, probably on Tuesday, before they are attached to the notebooks.  Please let me know if you are able to help out with either of these jobs.  dmcfarland@msad51.org

Snack time

We offer a choice of either the Mayberry or the McFarland classroom for a morning snack time for all of our team’s 4th-graders.  We alternate each week, one class being a quiet snack room and the other a regular snack room (notice we don’t call it “loud snack”! :).  Kids can usually choose which room they go to for that time each day.  In both rooms, kids can sit where they want, with whom they want, and enjoy snacks they bring from home.  In the quiet snack room, kids can draw, read, just sit and relax, listen to an audiobook, finish a project, or do homework they didn’t bring in from the night before.  (If it’s a missing-homework situation or a behind-in-classwork situation, that’s when a child may not get to choose; we often require that they do that work as they munch during quiet snack.)  Here are some of the happenings at quiet snack this week:

Academic Updates:

Writing Workshop

Our first writing unit is Personal Narrative (small moment stories).  We will refine skills and strategies from previous years and up the ante in terms of a variety of kinds of details, word choice, and story structure.  So far, we have determined writing territories (topics we are comfortable writing about), and all writers have completed an on-demand narrative prompt that shows what each child can do independently.  I’ll adjust writing mini-lessons and one-on-one conferring accordingly.  I do love this unit, because I get to know the kids in terms of their past experiences, relationships, and things they like to do!

Reading Workshop

I hope your child is as excited about her/his book bag as I am!  Mrs. Mayberry made most of them, and last year’s parent volunteers made the rest.  Inside the book bag -- which should come home and back to school every day -- we store about a week’s worth of books, the reading log, the reading notebook, and a pencil.  We are reviewing how our best reading progress happens and how to choose books that lend themselves to that reading progress and to our enjoyment of reading, both of which are very important.  Check out this chart to see what we’ve been talking about.

Math

This week we kicked off the first unit in the Everyday Math program. This unit focuses primarily on place value, understanding of large numbers, rounding numbers, adding/subtracting large numbers, and number stories. This week we worked on reading and writing large numbers and started to work on rounding.

    Students also had their first Home Link for homework on Thursday. You can expect students to have a Home Link every Monday and Thursday night. In another week some students may also have some journal pages to catch up on for homework on Wednesday. I will cover more of this on Monday at Parent Information Night.

Theme

We started the first project in our geography unit this week. Each student is creating a large map of North America, and in doing so we are focusing on neat handwriting, quality work, paying attention to details, and following directions. The end product will reflect all of these, and most students will be proud of their developing cartography skills.