Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of February 5, 2018

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, February 12: weekly reading logs due

Tuesday, February 13: Home Link is due

Wednesday, February 14: FULL day, Valentines Exchange

Thursday, February 15: math journal pages are due

Friday, February 16: Home Link is due/ SpellingCity is due

Monday, February 26: weekly logs are due

General News and Announcements

Welcome, Bruce!

The McFarlands welcomed a new student this week.  His name is Bruce, and he was in Mrs. Brown’s third grade class at MIW last year, so he’s a familiar face to a few of our students.  Please include Bruce in your Valentines!

Valentines Day

Students are welcome and encouraged to bring in Valentines for each child in the class.  In 4th grade, most students do bring them in.  All students must bring in a container to collect and bring home the Valentines they receive that day.  Containers can range from an elaborate, bejeweled masterpiece, to reusing last year’s container, to a plastic Hannaford bag. Containers and cards should be brought in to school on February 14th.  Each child has a class list.  Please add Bruce!  

Academic Updates

Writing Workshop

This week’s focus for informational writing has been pros and cons.  As a class, we made a T-chart of the pros and cons of being short.  Students taped a chart into their notebooks listing specific vocabulary that goes with pros and cons writing: drawback, advantage, convenience, flaw, etc.  Toward the end of the week, students starting writing paragraphs about pros and cons from their own T-charts based on a topic of their choice.  We have been typing all of the informational writing using Google Docs, for real-life, practical experience and for practicing typing for upcoming MEA testing (in March).  

Reading Workshop

See Mrs. Mayberry’s Theme update below to see how we are carrying our new historical fiction reading unit into social studies time!  Check out the goals for this unit below.

Math

In math this week students were introduced to adding fractions and mixed numbers. Some of the work also included fraction number stories.

Theme

Continuing our work with chain reaction machines students got to flex their creative engineering skills.

Also, as part of the historical fiction unit students will be starting in reading they will be learning background information about major time periods during theme. This will help support students reading comprehension and make historical fiction more enjoyable. On Friday students were introduced to slavery and the Civil War, which is the first time period they will encounter during historical fiction lessons in reading.