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.
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