Happy Friday amazing fourth grade families!
Congratulations on officially making it through our first week of distance learning! We can’t begin to express how much we have enjoyed seeing students’ smiling faces this week. It has been a joy to interact with them and also to see them interact with one another. We have spent the week discussing expectations for Google Classroom, Google Meet, Nearpod, and showing ROAR, as well as engaging in team builders to facilitate a feeling of classroom community despite being physically apart. We will continue to show grace and flexibility to our families as we navigate this learning curve. We appreciate the grace and patience that you all have provided us as well. We are looking forward to a fantastic year!
Math: We had a great first week in math! I am so impressed with all the 4th graders and their eagerness to learn. They were all so excited to start our first actual math lesson on Friday. We started with working on place value through millions and will continue next week with more place value concepts. I am still working on some kinks in determining how best to present each lesson, being sure I am able to model new concepts. Thank you all for your support as we are all experiencing this new way of learning together!
Science/Social Studies: Wow what a great first week! I have really enjoyed getting to know students through our daily google meet sessions and am excited to start our journey of learning together! Going forward we will be having 3 days a week of Science and 2 days a week of Social Studies. So that students know when to log into each of the classrooms we will be following the schedule of:
Social Studies: Monday and Tuesday
Science: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
Our first unit of study in Science will be the growth and development of plants and animals. Students may follow along in their DiscoveryEd techbook. We will be in Unit 4 Concept 1. I encourage students to utilize the resources available to them in the techbook as well as the lessons and resources provided in our live sessions.
Our first unit of study in Social Studies will be a look at Mesoamerica and the ancient civilizations that resided there. This is one of my personal favorite units in Social Studies and I hope students will enjoy learning about it as much as I do. Again, students will have access to the techbook in DiscoveryEd.
I hope you all have an amazing and restful weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone back on Monday!
ELA: We had so much fun getting to know one another this week through various teambuilders and Flipgrid videos! Today we discussed what skills are important to use while reading and how they help us better understand challenging texts. We began our first chapter of the novel Night of the Spadefoot Toads by reflecting on the main event in the chapter and who the main characters are, so that next week we can dive into comparing and contrasting two or more characters within a text. I will be posting a PDF of the day’s reading on Google Classroom for students to access the text. As we continue to get deeper into the novel next week, we will be analyzing figurative language and discussing themes.
Have a fantastic weekend!
The fourth grade team