Our Week in Review

Our first snow delay, and the frigid temperatures did not stop our amazing learning in room 24!

On Tuesday, we had a visit from Mrs. Silvia, from the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University. We learned about the Inuit, both past and present! We had the chance to try on authentic clothing and play some indoor games that the Inuit children may have played.

We continue to practice division in math.  Many students are feeling confident at school, and then they get home and feel worried or overwhelmed by their work. This is OK!  As with any new concept, it takes a while for children to own it. Thank you for your continued support with this.  As a reminder, there are videos posted on our blog to help with the process of division.  Also, the children have a visual sample that should be taken back and forth from school to home.  Knowing math facts automatically will help students feel more confident with the numbers they are dividing.  Using xtramath (M-Th) continues to be part of our nightly homework expectations, and will help students with learning their facts. This should take approximately 3-7 minutes. HOMEWORK REMINDER:  If your child has been productively working on his/her math homework for 20 minutes, and is unable to complete the assignment, please sign the top corner of the math HW.  This communicates that your child has put effort into his/her assignment, but something has been challenging.  In these instances, a teacher will check in with your child quickly, knowing that there were challenges.  Of course, always email Mrs. Merten with any questions/concerns about specifics.

Book Talks are a daily part of our Readers Workshop

The children are enjoying our Interactive Read Aloud, Little Dog, Lost.  The children enjoy our class discussions, and should have some things to share about this book.  During writing, we continue to work on our fiction stories.  With all of the activities of the last few weeks, we are not as far along in our stories as we would like.  We will devote more time with these stories in the next week. During Poetry Workshop with Mrs. Williams, students have studied Robert Louis Stevenson, and are now working on writing winter rhyming poems.

Many thanks to the Franklin Fire Department, who came to JFK to talk with our fourth graders about fire safety.  Don't be surprised if your children search your house for some of the fire hazards we learned about.

We had the opportunity to practice our speaking, listening, and using a map skills in an authentic way this week, when we participated in our first Mystery Skype!  We formed yes and no questions, based on answers we heard, and used our atlases in order to locate fourth graders from Ottawa, Ontario in Canada!  What an awesome way to make our learning of Canada come to life!  Your children should have much to share about this experience.  Stay tuned for more Mystery Skype visits.


We enjoyed using Kahoot in order to review for our Science test! What fun!  Students were well prepared for this assessment!

Students, please take a moment and share your thinking about fourth grade with Mrs. Merten by completing this survey.  Parents, our twitter feed located in the right sidebar of our blog provides a lot of information and can help frame conversations with your child about our week. Our "tweets" tell our class story in "real time" throughout the week.  You can also follow us @mertenladybugs.    Have a wonderful weekend!