Terrific Tuesday!

Today was a great day!  I trust that everyone had a fun and relaxing long weekend. The children were very welcoming to our visitor who will be with us again tomorrow. They were quite impressed with his ability in PE class.

We began our review for the ERB testing that will take place next week. We will use a sample booklet as well as complete a few worksheets as morning work just to reinforce the "art" of bubbling in an answer. I will also send home some review sheets for homework so that you can see some of the focus of these tests as well.

We will complete our Native American Essays and begin writing our Real-Fantasy-Real stories. You will want to ask your child was a "thread" is with this genre of reading and writing.

In Math, we will continue our work on fractions. It was my hope that on Friday we would spend our math time working on equivalent fractions. However, with the remaining portion of my class on Friday, I decided to wait until this week to tackle this skill. We will also work on long division and one last strategy called Lattice Multiplication to help with long multiplication problems.

Today our reading lesson revolved around how to write thick and thin questions while reading. These questions should also be a basis for good conversation in reading partnerships. In fourth grade, many of the reading activities are done in book clubs. So being able to carry on conversations about what one is reading is very important. I am hopeful that the work that we are doing in third grade now will reflect well in fourth grade and give them a solid foundation.

This week we will also begin looking at  rubric that fourth grade uses within the Reading Workshop times that itemizes certain reading behaviors. I am going to give a rubric to each of my children and individually talk about not only what I think their strengths and weaknesses are, but to also give them time to assess themselves. We are now setting goals for ourselves for  the remaining weeks of school. This rubric can potentially help them set goals for themselves to help their independent reading.

We will attempt our field trip again this Thursday. We will leave school around 9:50 and return by lunch time. Please make sure the children wear tennis shoes and are dressed in appropriate dress code attire.