Our Week In Review

This week, I thought I would post a bit about our week in the classroom. I hope that you have already heard a lot of this information from your child.

As you know, the children received the grades for their first math tests on Monday. I was really pleased with how they did! As with this test, I will try to send out a study guide for tests, and to give a week's notice. Sometimes with math I do give fewer days, depending on when we finish up the teaching portion of the unit. Keeping that in mind....we will have our first Social Studies test on Tuesday, 10/6. This will be on map skills, including latitude and longitude. I haven't announced the test at school, but will be announcing it on Tuesday. We will finish up the information for this unit on Tuesday and Wednesday.

We started two science experiments this week. First, we planted grass seed in 3 different types of soil- potting soil, sand, and a mixture of both. Students are learning about the scientific method, and each made a hypothesis about the grass. We will begin measuring the grass on Tuesday. We also were able to make terrariums. We used the steps of the scientific method to actually write up a lab report. Then we planted our plant clippings into the soil, added water and covered them. The children were so excited when we could actually see the water cycle in action-before the end of the day on Friday. We will view these to see the progression of the water cycle. Thank you to all of you who sent in extra jars and all of those plant clippings. We used almost all of them!


Classroom update about homework: This week I noticed that more students were forgetting items at home, which resulted in homework being missing. As you know, the focus of fourth grade is helping the students become independent, however some students still need reminders. Please check in with your child to see how they are doing with this. If he/she is forgetting things like getting the assignment notebook signed or library books, please try to remind them. I find that creating a list for children to follow helps them to remember all of the items they need. Next week, I will no longer be checking all of the assignment books nightly, rather, I will be doing "spot checks" to check that all assignments are written and materials are packed for those I'm checking. This is another step in the independence process.