Week of January 14th

Grade 4 Weekly Newsletter

January 14 - 18

Happy New Year and welcome back to school! We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. We are so excited to see our students and hear all about their winter break.

Curriculum

Reading:

We have started the historical fiction unit. The first bend in this unit equips students with the skills they need to handle increasingly complex texts. The second bend embarks upon the intellectual work of interpretation. The third bend brings in nonfiction texts and invites readers to think between those texts and the stories they are reading.

The lessons for this week are:

Lesson 1: Launching the Unit  

Lesson 2: Reading analytically at the start of a book

Lesson 3: Monitoring for sense: Fitting the pieces together

Lesson 4: Thinking across timelines: Fitting history and characters together

Essential Questions

• How does history influence the characters, setting, and events in a story?
• Who has power in the story?
• How are the books we read in our groups related?
• What makes our book club discussions meaningful?
  

Writing:

We are working on Bringing History to Life. In this historical nonfiction writing unit, students learn that information texts are often conglomerates, containing a lot of other kinds of texts. These might include an all about chapter, a how-to chapter, a diary, and/or an essay.

The lessons for this week are:

Lesson 1: Teaching as a way to rehearse for information writing

Lesson 2: Elaboration: The details that let people picture what happened long ago and far away

Lesson 3: Bringing information alive: stories inside nonfiction texts

Lesson 4: Essays within information texts

Essential Questions

• How can historical events be incorporated into our nonfiction writing?
• How can research help me write historical nonfiction?
  

Mathematics: 

This week we will be continuing Module 4 - Angle Measure and Plane Figures

This module introduces points, lines, line segments, rays, and angles, as well as the relationships between them. Students construct, recognize, and define these geometric objects before using their new knowledge and understanding to classify figures and solve problems. With angle measure playing a key role in the work throughout the module, students learn how to create and measure angles, as well as how to create and solve equations to find unknown angle measures.

Essential Questions:

• What strategies and tools can help determine the measurement of unknown angles?
• What important information can be determined from the attributes present in two-dimensional figures?
• How do we use geometry to help us make sense of the world?
  

The lessons for this week are:

Lesson 1: Recognize lines of symmetry for given two-dimensional figures. Identify line-symmetric figures, and draw lines of symmetry.

Lesson 2: Analyze and classify triangles based on side length, angle measure, or both

Lesson 3: Define and construct triangles from given criteria. Explore symmetry in triangles.

Lesson 4: Classify quadrilaterals based on parallel and perpendicular lines and the presence or absence of angles of a specific size.

Lesson 5: Reason about attributes to construct quadrilaterals on square or triangular grid paper.

Parent Tip Sheets: Topic A, Topic B, Topic C, Topic D.   

Here is the LINK to the Growth Mindset video we began to watch at Back To School Night. We suggest you watch it with your child and discuss what might create a positive math classroom at school. How can you build a positive math relationship with your child?

Science: Where the Wind Blows

This is the start of a new unit on weather and weather forecasting. Students will be placed in working groups, and each group will be given a city in a climatic zone. Students will then set up a computer spreadsheet and record weather data of their city from a weather website. In the coming weeks, the students will use the data that they have collected and have informed discussions on their climatic zone. At the end of the unit, students will use their city’s weather data to make a weather forecast that will be filmed.

Essential Question:

• Can weather be predicted accurately?
• How does the temperature and precipitation determine the climate?
  

The lessons for this week are:

• Lesson 1: Students are placed in working groups and be given a city to track it’s weather.
• Lesson 2: Students will set up their own computer spreadsheet to collect data. Students will look at the rubric for this unit.
• Lesson 2-3: Students will watch some weather videos and discuss their learning.
• Lesson 3: Students will discuss climatic zones.
• Daily: Students will collect weather daily from a weather website.
  

Grade 4 Homework:

Daily homework tasks will be written into student planners each day. Tasks may include reading for 20-30 minutes per night, writing for 10 minutes per night along with additional mathematics work. Homework may differ according to teachers and students. Any mathematics homework that students find challenging please advise their homeroom teacher so they can progress accordingly. Homework is not meant to be impossible, challenging for students to grow their brains, but not impossible!

Upcoming Events 

·    Tuesday, Jan. 16th - House Event Assembly

·     Wednesday, Jan. 17th - New Parent Orientation

·     Wednesday, Jan. 24th - Early Release Day

·     Thursday, Jan. 25th - Holiday

·     Sunday, Jan. 28th - Spelling Bee Written Exam (12:10pm)

·    Tuesday, Feb. 6th - 4M assembly

Announcements

ASA Resumes this Week

Just a reminder that ASA will resume this week. Gr.1-5 students go to their ASA locations. KG students will always be picked up from their classes.

Repeat Announcements

Core Value of the Month

During the months of December and January, we will focus on Integrity.