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.