Author Alert!- Megan McDonald

From An Unlikely Story in Plainville~

Beloved children’s book author Megan McDonald, creator of the wildly popular Judy Moody series, the Stink books, and The Sisters Club trilogy, is coming to An Unlikely Story on Sunday, October 20 at 2PM, for the newest Judy Moody book, BOOK QUIZ WHIZ! At the event, Megan will give a presentation, answer audience questions, and sign books. 

Tickets to this FREE event will be available Monday, September 30th at 10am.  Use this link to reserve tickets.

T-Shirts of the Day

Positive Vibes in Room 24!

Our Week in Review

This week was filled with lots of learning activities. 

Our Puff Mobiles are coming along nicely. Students are working as a team and are redesigning their vehicle as needed.  Each vehicle is unique!  We will have a 4th grade Puff Mobile race in another few weeks.

In math we finished reviewing addition and subtraction.  We will begin learning about multiplication and multiplicative thinking next.  Beginning next week, students' nightly practice should be Moby Max fact fluency.  Students received a second notice today with directions for how to log into this site. 

This week during reading we continued to practice our routines.  The students are improving with these daily.  We also read Mighty Jack by Ben Hatke.  We all loved this graphic novel.  Students are excited to read the next book in the series. Some students have signed up to give a book talk about a book that was loved.  Ask your child if he/she plans on giving a book talk this year.

This week we had a great Skype visit with author Amy Neilander.  She shared her wordless picture book, The Ladybug Race, and also shared her writing process.  The students were able to ask her questions as well. Thank you to the JFK PCC for funding this visit!

In writing we have been focusing on writing full and complete sentences. We have also been focusing on the audience.  We shared stories this week and discussed who would most enjoy reading the story. This allows writers to consider their audience while writing- and give them a slightly different focus. We had the chance to share a few "quick writes".  We will continue discussing this during the next few weeks, as we begin our next writing activity. Next week, expect your child to have questions about where he/she got his/her name.

During social studies, we have been learning about the world, the continents and the oceans.  This week we started to learn about latitude and longitude.  We will continue this next week, and students will have an assessment in a few weeks.

We continue to learn new things about each other during our morning meetings!

Our Week In Review

What a week!  We began our week with our fourth grade Community Meeting, where we learned our mantra was "Be an Engineer!"  This was important this week, as we had a visit from our Engineers in Residence on Thursday. Mr. Peter Gill and Mr. Andrew Leenhouts are both civil engineers are graduates of Franklin High School, and Peter is even a former JFK Ladybug (from Mrs. A.Williams' class)!  They explained how engineers work,and how the design process is important for them in their work.We planned our designs, and today during PBL, we worked on building our puff mobiles in teams.   We will have a fourth grade race in the coming weeks! 

On Tuesday we celebrated the 232nd anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution.  We watched some videos, participated in a group discussion and read some information about the Constitution and the Amendments.

During Morning Meetings we are continuing to practice speaking in front of our class by introducing our peers.  We are learning so much about one another!

During reading, we have continued to learn and practice finding evidence to support our thinking.  We have discussed narrative elements, and have enjoyed reading some great stories!  We will continue this work, reviewing reading strategies and practicing them during independent reading zone.  In the coming week, students will be practicing tracking the concepts we have been learning.  You might see your child stopping to "jot" on a post it note while reading.  This is a great habit to get into!  Thank you for supporting the routine that the same book should be read both at school and at home.  If your child is not happy with his/her book, please encourage him/her to talk to Mrs. Merten.  We will discuss options for the book.

We have been learning about addition during math this week.  We discussed various strategies for adding numbers. We also learned the importance of estimating sums before adding, in order to check the reasonableness of our answers.  Next week, we will be taking a math quiz, focusing on adding and subtracting. Students should be practicing math facts regularly.

During Social Studies we have started to learn more about the world. We are learning about the continents and the oceans. We will learn about different types of maps and how to read them.  We will also review different landforms.

Looking Ahead ~

We will continue learning about Map Skills during Social Studies.

We will begin learning about the water cycle and about plant structures and adaptations.  This will lead to the creation of our terrariums!

We will be learning about how we got our names, and then we will write about this.

We will assess our understanding of addition and subtraction skills with a math quiz next week.

Conferences are the week of October 29th.  Sign ups can be found here.