Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of March 5, 2018

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, March 12: weekly reading logs due

Tuesday, March 13: Home Link is due

Wednesday, March 14: FULL DAY

Thursday, March 15: math journal pages are due / No Homelink

Friday, March 16: NO SCHOOL/no SpellingCity this week

Monday, March 12: weekly logs are due

Special Announcements

On Tuesday, March 13th, all 4th grade students will be participating in an Iditarod activity as part of the Adventure-Based Learning (ABL) program. Part of this event will be held OUTSIDE. Please be sure your child has the appropriate attire for this day, including hats, gloves, snow pants, jackets and boots.

*Chorus students will still be having their concert rehearsal from 1:00-3:00.

Looking for: empty cereal boxes and cardboard tubes. Please send these in, and we will gladly repurpose them. Thanks

Kindness Rocks

We are asking students to bring in 1 or 2 palm-size rock(s) with a nice flat surface for a special project in connection with the school’s upcoming Habitat for Humanity Walk on March 30th. Rocks are needed NLT March 20th.

Academic Updates

Writing Workshop

Students have chosen the stories that they’ll be writing their own literary essays about, and they have crafted strong thesis statements.  Students have been annotating their copies of the stories, looking for evidence to support their thesis statements. They’re underlining, using brackets to indicate a longer section of text, using arrows, and writing in the margins their ideas as to how the details connect to their thesis statements.  This coming week, we will work on building solid boxes and bullets plans as the skeleton of the essay.

Reading Workshop

Mrs. Campbell and I have been collaborating to establish what independent work looks like and sounds like in our classroom; the students generated ideas, and they’ve been practicing working completely independently.  This is an important aspect to our upcoming book club work, when I won’t be holding individual reading conferences; I’ll be meeting with clubs and will therefore expect students to be independent.

    We have been practicing noticing details in books, determining what those details might tell us about the characters’ situations, and then asking ourselves, “What was it like to live in that time period?”  Some ideas that students have generated are, “Many people didn’t have enough food,” “Girls were not educated,” and “People had to make tough choices.”

   A higher-level concept that we are working on is identifying a theme of a text.  We are trying to go beyond a “life lesson,” such as, “Being honest is important.”  We already know that, right? So we are looking toward ONE word (sometimes two, less often, three) that represents a big idea.  Some themes we’ve identified are bravery, choices, fear, and freedom.

Math

This week we worked on finding lines of symmetry and we did a lot of work with multistep number stories. Students took the end of unit assessment on Friday. You can anticipate seeing progress packets by the end of next week.

Theme

This week students continued to work on their scientist research project. They are using books and online resources to gather information for a final project. Building in student choice, each child will have the option to select one of four types of final projects. All of this ties into the new read aloud being shared with students titled, The Fourteenth Goldfish, by Jennifer Holm.