First week back!

What a great week to return to school!  Everyone was ready to go, students, teachers, everyone.  As I saw many of you over this week, you expressed congratulations and welcome, and I would like to thank you for those sentiments.  It really meant a lot that I could stay home with my family as long as I did, and the support I felt in doing so was terrific.  So, thanks again!  Now on with news from fourth grade. 

The first week back from vacation can sometimes be tricky, but in this case it was as smooth as glass!  All students were ready to go as we came back, and as I got back in the groove, so did they!  Over the week we worked hard in all academic areas, and I will highlight a few of those here. 

In Math we continue to work on mastering facts.  In our class students are either working on mastering subtraction, or mastering multiplication.  When we talk about mastering these facts we mean able to answer any fact in these families (up to 10 x10, and any 2-digit subtraction fact) in two to three seconds.  We are working so students automatically recall these facts, rather than figure them out every time they are presented with them.  And in this undertaking for mastery, we need your help!  Every evening (or perhaps 5 out of 7) please take some time to practice some math facts with your students.  This practice can be done orally, with games, or with some practice provided from me.  For oral practice, just ask them some facts and give them about 3 seconds to answer, it is always a good idea to warm up the math thinking with some review...many of the students are strong with "make ten" facts and this can be a good place to warm up.  A make-ten fact is anything that originates or culminates with a ten: 10-6 = 4, 7 +___ = 10, 2 + 8 = 10, these can be in any order and moving between operations, addition and subtraction, will help build mastery.  Games you can play are a quick game of sums where each player flips a card, and the first to say the correct sum of the two cards wins the hand!  Another game is one of make-ten, this is where one player flips one card, and the first player to say what that card need to make ten wins the hand (i.e. if a 7 is flipped, the first player to say 3 wins the hand, as 7 + 3 = 10).  Fact practice is a part of homework each night, and if you would like some more formal practice for your student, let me know and I can arrange it!

We are also pressing on in other endeavors.  We are working on pieces of persuasive writing, trying to ease our readers into our writing, and them slap them in the face with our opinions at the end.  Students are writing about everything from the benefits of having dogs as pets, to end elephant poaching.  In these pieces of writing were are backing up our arguments with evidence, and this week we practiced cutting and pasting our writing, as to rearrange our arguments to see which order was most effective!  We also continue CLOSE reading, as we search for evidence and the "gist" of what is happening in our books.

I hope you all have a restful and refreshing weekend.

-Dave