Volume 4: 7 September 2015

A week full of learning, wonder, and real-life experiences, we have had! Students attended a field trip to a local farm where we saw strawberry, potato, corn, grape, cotton, and other crop fields. We even got to see a flower nursery in a greenhouse. Students made many connections between our central idea, Providing Food is Complex and Presents Challenges, to real-life on a farm. Students used their inquiry skills to ask questions like, "Where do you sell the food? How do you grow the food? How do you harvest the food? How do you keep the food safe?" We had fun in the soil and learned a lot!

In math, we continue our look at place value and how it helps explain our thinking. We are working in pairs to solve groups of addition or subtraction problems. Using math vocabulary like "ones, tens, hundreds, pattern, predict" and other words, we are explaining how individual equations are connected. We are also sharpening our skills with three awesome activities: Close to 100, 101-200 Bingo, and How Many Steps? on the 300 chart. It is pretty exciting to see students find patterns related to place value and with numbers to help them explain their thinking and mental math strategies!

We will complete our first writing piece this week, as we remind ourselves of the steps that great writers use to create imaginative and creative pieces of work. Just before our piece is ready to be published, students will peer conference with each other to make any last changes to improve their work.

In the coming week, we have two more field trips: Bazaar and Supermarket. We will look at how these places connect to our unit's central idea, as well as how they compare and contrast with each other.

Lastly, we will take our beginning of the year MAP test in Reading on Friday, 9/4. Thanks already for making sure your child has a healthy dinner and night's rest the evening before so they can do their best thinking and work! Have a great week and enjoy this week in pictures!

Homework:
Read 20 minutes each night, plus...

Monday: What is a sentence? Activity (2 sides)

Tuesday: IXL Math Grade 4 continue to work on Number Sense AND Please bring in one processed and one non-processed food. You will get the food back

Wednesday: Subject/Predicate Activity

Thursday: Sentence and Punctuation Activity

Friday: Relax and Read

Math activities!

Cotton and our Farmer!

Sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty to harvest those grapes!

Entering the wild, or just a row of grapes?

That bunch of grapes is as big as your head!

Livestock like cows and irrigation (watering the fields) helps farmers grow food!

Corn that's not ready to be harvested, but is still pretty cool!

We look like flowers!

Wait, those look like flowers. What do you see?

Sometimes working together is the best way to get something done!