Happy Friday fantastic fourth grade families!
We hope you have had a great week! We have enjoyed diving into content this week with students. They have shown patience and perseverance as we navigate distance learning. As a friendly reminder, if your student misses the Live Lesson they will need to complete the Student-Paced Lesson before 8am the following morning in order to be prepared for the next day’s learning. This includes completing the interactive slides within the presentation such as poll questions, open ended questions, and fill in the blank activities. Not only is this how we track attendance, but it also shows us a student’s level of understanding of the concepts being taught.
Lastly, we request that students have their cameras on so that they can participate in the lesson by using their Vista hand signals (agree, disagree, building on, etc.). This also allows us to provide immediate feedback to students using Class Dojo based on their engagement and participation.
Math: This week, we have been learning about decimal place value and how to write decimals through thousandths. The students have all been working so hard on these new concepts. We will finish up Chapter 1 next week with comparing and ordering decimals and will have our Chapter 1 assessment on Friday, August 21.
ELA: This week we continued reading our novel Night of the Spadefoot Toads. Overall, students really seem to enjoy the text and discussing the development of the characters as they face various challenges. Understanding the challenges characters face and how they respond to these challenges is going to support students when we begin to analyze the themes within the novel. Using the text, we have also analyzed the author’s craft and structure when it comes to figurative language and determining the meaning of challenging words. Today, I introduced the concept of external and internal conflict within characters. We will continue to go back to these concepts throughout the novel and year. Definitions, videos, interactive games, etc. can be found on the Stream for students to practice, if they would like.
For writing, we focused on point of view and what third person limited point of view sounds like when we are the author. Students had the opportunity to choose a part of the novel and rewrite it in a third person limited point of view from the perspective of a character other than Ben. This allowed students to be creative and think critically about what some of the other characters in the text might be thinking and feeling.
Our conventions focus has included: concrete nouns, abstract nouns, proper nouns, common nouns, plural nouns, singular nouns,collective nouns, and adverbs. I will continue to reinforce these skills.
I have received quite a few questions regarding quizzes and therefore wanted to clarify. When students submit their quiz answers, the computer automatically grades the multiple choice and checkbox questions correct or incorrect. However, it does not give students points for the short & long answer questions. Students are perceiving that they got the question incorrect because they did not immediately receive credit for it, while in reality this just means that it is waiting for me to individually grade those questions and give points based on their answers. I hope this clarifies!
Science:
We have been learning about the growth and development of baby animals and what it takes for them to survive. Students have explored the life cycle of mammals, how some animals change their appearance to become adults, and how different species of animal parents help their offspring to survive and become adults. We will be diving a little deeper into these ideas on Wednesday and Thursday of next week, then students will be ready to assess this chapter next Friday.
Social Studies:
In Social Studies this week we began our unit on Mesoamerica and the ancient civilizations that resided there. Students have been practicing using map skills to identify physical features and places on a map of South America to better understand the geography of where the Maya lived. Next week, we will begin to really discover the Mayan civilization such as their way of life, religion, and cultural innovations. I am very excited to dig into this unit further as it tends to be a student favorite throughout the year!
We are looking forward to another awesome week next week! Have a great weekend.
-The fourth grade team