Week of September 23rd

 Welcome back to another great week in 4th grade! Last week was packed full of amazing learning and this week is going to be the same. I am so excited about what we have learned so far this year. I know I keep saying that, but it really has been so awesome!

ELA:

This week in English Language Arts we are going to continue learning about subjects and predicates. Their assigned IXL skills will be practicing this as well. We will also be continuing our work on morphemes and improving our reading comprehension by annotating as we read. 

This is NOT a quiz week so students will have the opportunity to study to retake a quiz from last week if they scored below a 70%. The quiz from last week will come home today.

Reading Calendars for September will be due next Tuesday. It may be a good idea to sit down with your student this week to go over how many minutes they have read so far so that they can plan accordingly.

Math:

This week we will begin working on Topic 2 which is all about adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers. We will be learning the properties of addition along with practicing mental math and estimating. 

Your student will be bring home their "Topic 1 Celebration of Learning" today. This is what we call our tests because truly, they should be a celebration of all of the learning we have done. I am so pleased with how the majority of my students have done on this. They took the online version of the assessment and had to show their work on a piece of notebook paper just like they do for an assignment. Each problem was worth at least 2 points (depending on how many parts it had). One point was for the correct answer and one point was for showing their work. 

I do this because when a student missed a problem, I was able to refer back to their work and look at how they answered it on the computer to see if they struggled with the skill or the format. So many of my students seem to understand the skill, they are struggling with which part is the answer. This goes along with the idea of taking the concepts they have learned and then going deeper with them and asking students to answer in a more complex way. 

We will be going over these tests today in class so that students can see what they did wrong to make sure they are studying the correct thing. 

Vision Charter Fall Festival:

Our amazing PFSA is putting on our annual Fall Festival on this Friday, September from 5:00-8:00 pm. This is a phenomenal time for families and a wonderful fundraiser for our PFSA. They use that money to help fund things like Wagons Ho for 4th grade among so many other things. We are so beyond thankful that they do this for us! There will be games, food trucks, a dunk tank (that I may be in at 6:30), and live and silent auctions with amazing items that you won't want to miss out on! 

The PFSA is in need of volunteers to help run the games and donate candy. If you would like to help run one of the games please click HERE to sign up. If you are able to donate candy please click HERE to sign up for that. At the very least, please put this on your calendars and plan to come have a wonderful time with your friends and families and support our school at the same time!

Parent/Teacher Conferences:

Parent/Teacher Conferences will be on October 10th and 11th. On October 10th, both 4th grade classes will be offering 3 sessions that you will have the opportunity to sign up for. If I have specific concerns I want to address with you about your student, I will send you a separate email to schedule a time on the morning of the 11th. Everyone is invited to sign up for a session on the 10th (even if you have one scheduled for the 11th) and I am so excited for these as we will be doing "A Day in the Life of a 4th Grader" and we will be doing a condensed day in our classroom with our parents! Please mark your calendars and plan to attend, I think it's going to be so much fun! I will be sending out more information as we get closer, but I wanted to give you a heads up as well as I know that calendars fill up quickly. :)

October Book Celebration:

If you are new to Vision Charter School, you may not be aware of our October Book Celebration. Each grade level has a dedicated classic book that they read for the month of October, in 4th Grade we read Alice in Wonderland. Then on the 31st, students are invited to dress up like a character from that book. This is optional and should be fun. I always encourage my students to be creative and find and create their costume with things they already have at home! We will have a Book Celebration party that day and I will be contacting parents who indicated they want to help with parties to get that planned. If you would like to help, but didn't fill out a volunteer form at Meet the Teacher, please let me know and I will send one  home with your student. 

Week of September 16th

 I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and are ready to go for another amazing week! I am so excited about all the growth I have seen already in my students and I am just so proud of how hard they have been working. You should feel proud of your student, and yourself! Fourth grade can be a difficult adjustment but I have watched each of my students and their families approach it with tenacity and excitement!

English Language Arts:

This week we will be finishing up our first essay of the year!  I am not usually able to say that until the second quarter and we just finished week 5! When I say I am impressed with this class, I mean it! I am excited to see what my students have written and be able to send them home for you to enjoy as well.

We are working on learning how to annotate as we read to help improve our reading comprehension. We will be doing this with various non-fiction articles from ReadWorks. For now I am printing them off for my students so that we can annotate with pencils and highlighters while we are learning how to annotate. After a while, we will move to reading them online and using the tools online to annotate. 

This Thursday we will have our first Morning Warm Up quiz. Each day we do what is called a Morning Warm Up. This practices various ELA skills as a quick warm up in the morning before we start our lesson. Every other week I will give students a quiz over these skills. If your student scores below a 70% on a quiz, they may student and retake it with in a week of taking the quiz. If a student wants to do this, they have to come and let me know that they have studied and are ready to retake the quiz. The highest score allowed on a retake is a 70%, even if they get a 100% on the retake. I want to encourage my students to study for tests and quizzes the first time, but I also want to encourage them to keep trying if they don't succeed the first time. :)

Math:

This Tuesday we will be taking our first test this week on Topic 1. This will be testing all the things we reviewed on place value. Test retake procedures are the same for this as mentioned above. 

We will be taking our first Math 4 Today quiz on Thursday. These quizzes will be every other week like the Morning Warm Up quizzes. They have the same test retake procedure as well.

We will be starting Topic 2 on Wednesday. This Topic is all about adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers. I was sharing with my class on Thursday that pretty much all of 4th grade math is not new for students as the concepts have been introduced in K-3. We then take those skills and dig deeper with them. 

Xtramath practice is still homework for all of my students. Although I do have a couple of kiddos that are getting really close to mastering all of their multiplication facts!! Students need to complete 4 days worth of lessons and they have Monday through Sunday to do this. This allows you to make it work with your schedule as I know evenings can be busy. Any assignment not completed in class must be done that day as homework, however. Almost all of my students have been doing a great job of doing this! My hope is that students will realize that they really don't want to have to do this at home, so they will work extra hard to stay on task to get it done here at school. :)

Just a reminder, that each math lesson assignment is worth 10 points. For students get full credit they must get a 70%+ on the online part, and turn in their paper that shows ALL of their work. I spend a significant amount of time each day modeling how I want them to show their work before I release them to complete the assignment. My page that shows how to show their work then stays projected up on the board for them to refer back to. Showing their work is an expectation and half of their grade for tests and quizzes as well. This is true for 5th grade, middle school, and high school. I keep reminding my students that the sooner they accept that and comply, the easier math will be for them. :)

Vision Charter Fall Festival:

Our amazing PFSA is putting on our annual Fall Festival on Friday, September from 5:00-8:00 pm. This is a phenomenal time for families and a wonderful fundraiser for our PFSA. They use that money to help fund things like Wagons Ho for 4th grade among so many other things. We are so beyond thankful that they do this for us! There will be games, food trucks, a dunk tank (that I may be in at 6:30), and live and silent auctions with amazing items that you won't want to miss out on! 

The PFSA is in need of volunteers to help run the games and donate candy. If you would like to help run one of the games please click HERE to sign up. If you are able to donate candy please click HERE to sign up for that. At the very least, please put this on your calendars and plan to come have a wonderful time with your friends and families and support our school at the same time!

Parent/Teacher Conferences:

Parent/Teacher Conferences will be on October 10th and 11th. On October 10th, both 4th grade classes will be offering 3 sessions that you will have the opportunity to sign up for. If I have specific concerns I want to address with you about your student, I will send you a separate email to schedule a time on the morning of the 11th. Everyone is invited to sign up for a session on the 10th (even if you have one schedule for the 11th) and I am so excited for these as we will be doing "A Day in the Life of a 4th Grader" and we will be doing a condensed day in our classroom with our parents! Please mark your calendars and plan to attend, I think it's going to be so much fun! I will be sending out more information as we get closer, but I wanted to give you a heads up as well as I know that calendars fill up quickly. :)

October Book Celebration:

If you are new to Vision Charter School, you may not be aware of our October Book Celebration. Each grade level has a dedicated classic book that they read for the month of October, in 4th Grade we read Alice in Wonderland. Then on the 31st, students are invited to dress up like a character from that book. This is optional and should be fun. I always encourage my students to be creative and find and create their costume with things they already have at home! We will have a Book Celebration party that day and I will be contacting parents who indicated they want to help with parties to get that planned. If you would like to help, but didn't fill out a volunteer form at Meet the Teacher, please let me know and I will send one  home with your student. 

Week of September 9th

 I am so sorry for getting this out to you a day late. I spent quite a bit of time getting my digital interactive notebooks caught up after school yesterday so that students would be able to access them if they needed to complete their own. The pages that have flaps take me quite a bit longer to put together. :) I linked the Parts of Speech Rap in the digital notebook so that students can listen to it while they are practicing their assigned IXL skills which cover nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. 

ELA:

This week we have hit the ball rolling! We have started digging into our morphemes and creating our Morpheme Lexicon and our Morpheme Deck. We will use these to help improve our reading comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and improve our spelling! We are really working on knowing these well as they are replacing our weekly spelling lists! Can I get an "OH YEAH!" :) I have included the Morpheme Lexicon in our Interactive Reading Journal so there are pages in the digital version as well. 

Math:

This week in math we are really working on understanding place value and the relationships between the place values. Students need to understand that for a digit to move to the next place value, it is multiplied by 10. I have included the page from our interactive notebook to help students if they are working on assignments at home. 

Just a reminder that Xtramath is homework until your student masters their multiplication facts. I have a few students who are getting close! Once they are mastered, this is no longer daily homework. If your student does not complete their daily assignment in class, that is homework and needs to be completed and turned in the next morning. 

Must Do/May Do:

When a student in my class finishes an assignment before it is time to move on to the next thing, they are responsible for being independent learners and beginning work on their Must Dos. On the board in my class I have listed Must Dos that are in read and numbered. That is because Must Dos must be done and the must be done in that order. When a student has completed their Must Dos, they will show me and are then free to do May Dos. May Dos are still academic in nature, but are more "fun". 

Each week I will assign IXL skills for both Language Arts and Math. These are related to what we are doing in class. Students need to get a Smart Score of 80 or higher to have mastered that skill. Once all of them are mastered they don't have to worry about that Must Do for the rest of the week. This is not homework, but students may want to do them at home so that they can have Thirsty Thursday. 

On Thursday, we have what we call "Thirsty Thursday" (named by one of my students last year since we couldn't do Fun Friday anymore :) ). Students who have the first three Must Do's completed for the week, get 10 minutes of extra recess. Those students who do not have those completed will work in the class quietly on getting them done. 

Snack and Track:

Every day at 1:55 my students have Snack and Track. They run a lap and then have free time outside for the next 15 minutes while they eat a snack to tide them over for the rest of the day. Please help your student remember to bring a healthy snack, not a treat like candy. One of our 4th Grade Essential 44 Rules is #44 "Bring a snack, not a treat, for Snack and Track. We want to fuel our brains, not rot our teeth."

I give students the option of running their lap and then coming in to finish their snack if they have unfinished work that they would like to work on in the class while I am there to help them. This is optional and up to your student, I don't like to take away recess time from students unless I have no other option.

Agendas and Home Folders:

This is the first year we have had agendas provided by the school for 4th grade. Thank you to Mrs. Burton for making that happen for us! We are still getting into the routine of filling these out throughout the day as we get new assignments. Students are told to put a check by it once it is completed. This let's them know what needs to be completed at home as homework. They are supposed to show you when they are done and ask you to sign the top of each day next to the star when they have completed everything. Each morning they put out their Home Folder and agenda open to the previous school day and I check them off. They get 3 points per day in their Study Skills grade. 1 point is for their Home Folder, 1 point is for bringing their agenda, and 1 point is for having a parent sign it. 

Your student has their Login Card taped to the inside of their Home Folder so that they have access to anything we use at school. 

Because we are a college prep school as part of our charter, we are working to instill those good study habits that will benefit them in their academic career for the rest of their lives. Thank you so much for helping reinforce this at home!

Homework is easier if your student is logged into a Chromebook using their school account. The school has older Chromebooks that have been retired that are available to students on a first come, first serve basis. They are "as is" and no tech support is offered for them, but if you would like your student to have one, please email me and let me know! I have to have an email from a parent before I can send one home with a student. 

Attendance:

Please make every effort to have your student here at school on time every day. We hit the ground running right at 8:00 am with our learning. If your student misses a day, not only is it overwhelming to make up all that work, they aren't getting the same quality of education since they are missing all direct instruction. 

Aside from that, being a charter school means we are not eligible for bonds or levies like regular public schools. The bulk of our funding from the state for the year is based on ATTENDANCE, not enrollment, from the first day of school to the beginning of November. Please make every effort to make appointments and schedule vacations during our days off. That is part of why the decision was made to go to 4 day weeks so that students could go to the doctor etc. on those days. 

Even more important, I love my students and I miss them when they are not here! This is an INCREDIBLE group of 4th graders and I am loving every day with them. 

Thank you!

I also wanted to say THANK YOU to you, the parents and guardians of my students. You have been so amazing to work with so far this year. Thank you for your emails seeking clarification and being so involved in your child's education. Please know that your emails asking questions, seeking clarification, or just sharing information about your student makes my job so much easier and more enjoyable! I can totally see why this group of kids is so amazing after just a few weeks of working with you all! Keep it up!

Week of September 3rd

 I hope you all had a lovely long weekend despite all the smoke! This week is just a three day week since we have moved to a "no Friday" calendar (with the exception of the last week of school that is a five day week).

ELA:

This week we are going to be creating a commercial for different products. This is our first group project and it is a fun way to set the expectations and practice working collaboratively in a group. We have also begun working on narrative writing. We talked about the different parts that make up a narrative writing and practiced identifying them in different short videos to help us plan and figure out what may be missing or what we would change if we were the author. 

September Reading Calendars went home last Thursday. They should stay in the back pocket of their Home Folder. That way they always know where it is and can fill it out if they get their reading done at school. This will be due on Tuesday, October 1st. 

Math:

This week we are going to continue working on place value concepts. We are doing this by creating pages in our Interactive Math Journals and we will hopefully be starting lessons in Savvas which is our math curriculum. 

Math homework is still on xtramath.com until my students have mastered their multiplication facts by being able to consistently answer them in under 3 seconds. Once students have mastered this, they no longer have to do xtramath as a homework assignment!

After they have done that, the only math homework they will have is if they do not finish a math assignment in class. They will be able to access this at home from the Google Class as long as they are logged into their school email account, which is through Gmail. 

Home Folder and Agenda:

We are working on getting into the routine of filling out our Agenda book as we go throughout the day with each assignment that is given. If they finish the assignment in class, they are supposed to put a check mark next to it indicating it is done. If they don't finish it, they are supposed to put that on the "Back to School/Unfinished Work" side of their Home Folder so that they can finish it at home. They are supposed to be showing this to you each day when they get home to show you what is done and what is not. One parent had a good idea to have them write a behavior update at the bottom so I had my students do this last Thursday. They should write "no name on board, name on board, or incident report" on the line depending on how their day went. This is one more way to communicate with parents on how our day is going.

Four Houses - One Family:

You may have heard your student talking about being sorted into houses here at school. We are joining schools around the world by bringing the House System to our school. Students will be randomly placed into one of four houses today. The houses focus on different cultures, but most importantly really embody and reinforce the character traits that Vision has adopted. Once a student is placed in a house (or team) they are there for the whole time they are at Vision! This is across grade levels to help foster mentorship relationships and provide leadership opportunities. Schools who have implemented this have seem improvement in student's academics, behavior, and social emotional well-being. I have already seen so much of this in my class already and I am so excited to see where we go!

The four houses are Rêveur (French - The House of Dreamers), Isibindi (South African - The House of Courage), Amistad (Mexico - The House of Friendship), and Altruismo (Brazil - The House of Givers). The main idea is that we may be in four different houses, but we are still  one Vision Charter family. We talk about how we want to uplift others because when one of us does well, we all do well! We want to foster healthy competition while still rooting for everyone. This may sound like "My house is the best!" rather than "Your house is not as good as my house!"

Students will be able to earn points for their house. We are working on getting the House App set up and when that happens I will let you all  know. You will get a notification if your student earns a point and why. Points have to be earned though! They are not confetti so students really have to go above and beyond to get a point, so if your student isn't getting points every day, that's ok! We are setting the bar high and watching our students rise to it! In the app you can see how your student's points are contributing to their house here at the school, but also to their house globally! 

Parents at other schools have really gotten into this and dress in their student's house colors and have even come up with names for themselves, like Ami-Mommies. :) I have seen pictures of parents who have kids in different houses so they have cut apart shirts and sewn them back together to represent both houses. Feel free to get involved with your kids and make it FUN! 

I will post pictures of our sorting sometime this week! :)