Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of January 22, 2018

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, January 29: weekly reading logs due

Tuesday, January 30: Home Link is due

Wednesday, January 31: early release

Thursday, February 1: math journal pages are due

Friday, February 2: Home Link is due/ SpellingCity is due

Monday, February 5: weekly logs are due

General News and Announcements

Report Cards

Your fourth-grader will bring home her/his first semester report card today!  The grades summarize achievement from the beginning of the school year through now.  We will schedule parent/teacher conferences for the end of March/beginning of April.

Wellness Awareness

Here are GMS ⅘, we have a long history of organizing a staff wellness afternoon, and this year it’s scheduled for next Wednesday.  I’d like to bring a small piece of wellness awareness to both classes of students next week.  We will be learning how to read and understand nutrition labels, and we’ll learn about fiber, sugar, and sodium.  

    Please support this work by sending in empty food containers that show a nutrition label, such as granola bar boxes, juice containers, yogurt containers, mac and cheese boxes, etc.  If you can send them in on Monday, that would be so helpful.

    In addition, Wednesday will be One-Ingredient Wednesday!  Students who wish to participate will try to bring in snacks that have only one ingredient (or as close to one ingredient as possible).

Academic Updates

Writing Workshop

Essays are done!  Students typed them, we’ll print soo, and then I’ll score them.  Up next: a modified informational unit where students will write about an area of personal expertise, using different text structures.

Reading Workshop

Students worked hard this week to create teaching tools about their subtopics.  We set the criteria for the teaching tools together, and then students went to work creating them.  Friday, we also set criteria for a strong presentation, as both presenters and listeners.  Then, all groups presented.  See photos below!

Math

In math this week students continued their work with determining the area of a rectangles and rectilinear shapes. They also worked on multi-step (3 or 4 steps!) story problems involving addition, subtraction and multiplication. This is where all the learning around computation really gets a heavy workout!

Theme

Have you noticed your fourth grader taking a particular interest in chain reaction machines? Our science lessons this week may be to blame! Students worked on how chain reaction machines work, and how stored energy, involving height, play a major role in these fun inventions.

Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of January 15, 2018

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, January 22: weekly reading logs due

Tuesday, January 23: Home Link is due

Wednesday, January 24: early release

Thursday, January 25: math journal pages are due

Friday, January 26: Home Link is due/ SpellingCity is due / report cards go home with students

Monday, January 29: weekly logs are due

General News and Announcements

Monthly Reading Calendars

Some readers have been offered to try out a Monthly Reading Calendar for this second half of January!  Those students brought home the calendar with a written explanation of how to use it.  We talked about it at length in class, and I intend to offer this option to more and more students as the winter moves on!

Academic Updates

Writing Workshop

Wow!  We have come a long way from where we left off in December!  Students have strengthened their writing by learning about and using the following writing concepts and moves:

• transitions to start new paragraphs
• strong ending sentences
• unpacking evidence by including a sentence to show readers how the evidence connects to their ideas
• transitions to “unpack” evidence
• using information from a survey or an interview
• using a statistic
• using a quote
• strong introduction paragraphs
• meaningful ending paragraphs
• anticipating a counter-argument and using a rebuttal sentence
• revising with a checklist
• revising by assigning ourselves specific jobs
• editing for spelling by reading our piece backwards
• finding words in a dictionary by using base words

And today, we started typing the final drafts!

Reading Workshop

Holy cow, we have been doing tough stuff in reading workshop.  We have been piloting a new nonfiction unit called, Reading the Weather, Reading the World.  As we research extreme weather, students have been trying to identify different text structures authors use within a text, such as compare/contrast, chronological order, problem/solution, and cause & effect.  Then, we use certain note-taking techniques as we read, and that helps us to determine the big ideas and supporting details.  And...it works.  It’s hard, but it works!  Who knew?

See how Caroline has found a way to write down the main details about dust devils, and then she used a Venn diagram to compare and contrast fire whirls and waterspouts!

Above, Kyra used a cause & effect format to take notes on the causes of hurricanes.

Below, she writes the steps in chronological order of how a hurricane starts.

Of course, not all students are working at this level of understanding, but I can assure you that they are all taking risks and practicing this work as a group, with a partner, and/or in their research teams.

Math

In math over the past two weeks students learned to convert metric units of mass (grams and kilograms) and metric units of liquid volume (liters and milliliters)  In addition, students have learned to multiply large numbers using partial products. This is an invaluable algorithm for students to grasp, as it gives them a strong foundation for understanding the meaning behind multiplying large numbers. Becoming proficient with this algorithm goes well beyond the rote memorization of steps.

Theme

This week in our Mystery Science unit called Energizing Everything students explored how roller coasters use height as a form of energy. They had fun building marble roller tracks and testing how various release heights impact the speed and distance the marble will travel. More experiments along this line to come next week.