Language Arts

We have been focusing on paragraph writing, proofreading, and poetry.  Ask your child about how the colorful season of Fall has helped reinforce your child’s paragraph and poetry skills!

Reading: 

The 4th grade enjoyed a productive and fun Read-a-Thon!  Everyone shared a favorite book with the class.  See the photos in our gallery:   http://ssanchez.reedschools.org/read-a-thon.html

We continued to read Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko.  Ask your child what new developments have come to pass in Part 2 of this interesting novel.

THANK YOU to Ms. Jordan for coming in and reading with us!  Don’t forget go to our class calendar on www.lotsahelpinghands.com to sign up for reading groups in the next few months.  (The email address is SanchezCats@gmail.com, password is catscountry.)  We need 4-5 adults each Wednesday from 9:15-10:15.  Thank you!

Math

We are wrapping up our unit on multiplication and are transitioning to long division.   This week students learned about factor trees, multiples, and divisibility rules.  PLEASE have your child continue to practice his/her multiplication facts at home daily!

Check out our class website for this weeks KenKen challenge!  http://ssanchez.reedschools.org/challenge-math--kenken.html

Social Studies 

Students are learning about early European explorers who (aside from the natives who inhabited the land for many years prior) first explored the California coast.

 Science

Students have completed the life science unit on Ecosystems and Environments.  As a final project, we dissected owl pellets to see what kind of bird or rodent was eaten and regurgitated.  Ask your child about this activity!

Check out the photos:  http://ssanchez.reedschools.org/owl-pellet-dissection.html

Spanish:

Our class is creating weather reports in Spanish on the iPads!  Students are using the App Toontastic to create an interactive weather project using the vocabulary and tools learned in Spanish class.  See the videos on the class website:

http://ssanchez.reedschools.org/spanish-videos.html

Miscellaneous:

·       I enjoyed visiting with all of you and discussing the progress and goals of our children.  This year is off to a great start!

·       We are doing a Thanksgiving play next Tuesday at  9:30am.   It is only 10 minutes long, but parents are welcome to come and ‘take in the theater’!  We will have seating set up for a live audience.  However, I will record the performances and upload the videos onto the class website video gallery on Tuesday for your at-home viewing pleasure.

·       Enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday!  No school Wednesday-Friday.

·       Friday, November 30th is our class field trip to the Laurence Hall of Science in Berkley.  

·       Book orders will be due December 7th.

Language Arts

Despite the mid-week holiday, students have been reading and writing up a storm here in CATS Country!  Students continued to write meaningful paragraphs and detailed sentences, and created some festive Halloween stories with unusual characters and situations.  Ask your child about his/her story!

Students have begin formulating a fall poem to accompany their fall artwork, and created a poem about the California Bear flag in cursive.

Reading:  We continued to read Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko.  Students continue to write in their literary response journal, and think about what life would be like as another person. 

THANK YOU to Ms. McDonnell, Mr. Bressie, Ms. McIntosh, Ms. Royal and Ms. Schory for coming in to read with us on Wednesday.  Don’t forget go to our class calendar on www.lotsahelpinghands.com to sign up for reading groups in the next few months.  (The email address is SanchezCats@gmail.com, password is catscountry.)  We need 4-5 adults each Wednesday from 9:15-10:15.  Thank you!

Our Chris Van Allsburg author’study continued with the books The Widow’s Broom and  Wreck of the Zephyr.  Ask your child what elements all the Van Allsburg books have in common, and what makes his writing style unique.

Math

We continue to practice the common core methods of learning multiplication, which is to fully understand the reasoning behind the algorithms.  This week we created arrays to represent multiplication problems, and mastered the lattice form of multiplication.  Students also began learning about partial products, which uses the distributive property of multiplication to multiply larger products.  Look for upcoming videos in our classroom website gallery.  Students will become the ‘teachers’ of the skills learned and will walk us through a process.

Social Studies 

Students completed their 5 paragraph essays on a California region, and created a booklet complete with all 4 regions.   You child has also created a Keynote presentation about his/her region to put into his/her technology portfolio.

 This week students began learning about how Europeans came to explore the coast of California.

 Science

Decomposers!  Producers!  Consumers, oh my!  Students have mastered the knowledge of food chains and food webs, and which organisms belong to which group.  Meanwhile, the terrariums are officially overgrown!  On Friday, (day 27), the crops reached maximum capacity in the terrariums, and each group strategized how to replant their crops into an earth box/planter. Thank you Ms. Sawhney, for helping groups out in the garden.  Check out the photos on in the gallery on the class website! 

Miscellaneous:

*Monday, November 12th, there will be no school in honor of Veteran’s Day.

*Parent-teacher conference week is November 13-16th.  Class is dismissed at 12:10, before lunch.

*What a great Halloween party!  Thank you to all the fabulous volunteers for organizing, helping, and contributing to the party.  Good times!  Check out the photos on the classroom webpage gallery:

*4th grade read-a-thon is Tuesday, November 6th.  Students can bring their favorite book(s) and wear pj’s to school.