Weekly Updates - April 2024
Week of April 2nd-5th
Parent/Teacher Conferences are on the 10th. Remember to VOTE for the LSC members for next school year!
Our book fair is confirmed for April 22-25, 2024!
4th grade parents - please remember to sign up for a conference time. If you cannot attend conferences, please let me know and I will send home report cards.
4th Grade
We are starting our new novel Tuck Everlasting. We spent the week discussing symbolism in the prologue. We read the first five chapters and looked for elements of the exposition and foreshadowing. We almost completed our Imaginative Writing projects where students were given a photo to use as the basis for their short story. The projects will be hanging on the bulletin board outside of Room 108 on Wednesday. In Social Studies we learned about scarcity of natural resources in the Southwest region.
3rd Grade
The third grade students began their new novel The Wild Robot. They visualized the setting and used context to define unfamiliar words. They read and annotated independently, which is new for this quarter. The answered comprehension questions, or 'right there' questions, about the chapters they read. In writing class we began our Poetry unit. They will complete various types of short poems each day culminating in a poetry booklet that they will bring home when finished. We began our Science Unit on Environment and Survival. Students will study why a specific snail population is decreasing and what environmental factors are causing the change. The 3rd graders earned 10 minutes of incentive time and got to go outside before Social Studies. Next week we are hoping for longer!
Week of April 8th-12th
Our book fair is confirmed for April 22-25, 2024!
Week of April 15-19th
Our book fair is confirmed for April 22-25, 2024!
Star 360 Testing
3rd and 4th grade will take Star 360 Reading tests on Wednesday, May 8th.
4th Grade - We have a book chapter project for Tuck Everlasting that will be ongoing throughout this book. Students had their first Literature Circles and they crushed them! They had roles that they had to bring to the group and have a discussion about the text. It was fun! They also had to compare the two main settings of the story and how the author used expressive language to get a sense of both locations. They also complete Unit 5 Lesson 3 in Social Studies. We read whole group and independently about how the culture of the Native American Nations has had an impact today.
3rd Grade - We continued to work through The Wild Robot. This week we practiced comprehension skills, context clues and comparing and contrasting stories and characters. They are continuing to make their poetry books in writing. This week we did Free Verse and Diamante poems. We also are learning what factors make an organism more or less likely to survive. They played a very fun game with two scenarios. One environment allowed the red squirrel population to flourish and the other? Not so much.
Week of April 22nd-26th
Star 360 Testing
3rd and 4th grade will take Star 360 Reading tests on Wednesday, May 8th.
4th Grade - We have a book chapter project for Tuck Everlasting that will be ongoing throughout this book. Students completed multiple RACES responses to reading to help prepare them for 5th grade. They completed their 2nd literature circle taking on different roles from last week. Students published their procedural writing. We will take out Social Studies Unit 6, Lesson 1 quiz on Monday.
3rd Grade - We continued to work through The Wild Robot. This week we practiced comprehension skills, context clues and cause and effect. Students published their poetry books which will be sent home next week. We did an activity in Science were students learned that variations in traits can effect an animals' chance of survival. They used pipettes that had been altered to see how much water they could take in a minute.