Carnival was a spooktacular hit! The kids had a wonderful time. They even convinced me to go through the Haunted Maze! Thank you to everyone who spent time with us and donated to the class party. Please do not send your child in costume tomorrow. We will have a regular day. There will be no homework. Conferences are this week. Please check SignUp Genius for your conference time. I am looking forward to seeing you. Springfield Trip I am excited to announce that our Springfield trip will take place Thursday and Friday, May 4 & 5. Please mark your calendars! More info to follow... LA There has been a mad flurry of typing around these parts. We are prepping our memoirs for online publication and will share with you when they are complete. The students wrote, self edited and peer edited the work that is being done. I love seeing them discuss word choice and punctuation rules. Don't Hide It, Flaunt It! is an essay contest students worked on this week. They brainstormed things that made them different and wrote about how it has influenced their lives. There has been insightful conversation about what makes us different and how it makes us who we are. Super Grammar introduces us to The Noun Team and The Pronoun this week. Check out the comics hanging outside the classroom that demonstrate the powers of The Subject and The Predicate. The whole class is reading the novel Eight Keys by Suzanne LaFleur. This realistic fiction novel focuses on friendship and family as one moves into middle school. It is a great way for students to connect to their own lives and start talking about middle school at Roycemore. Ask your student about the first day of school for Elise. It was a rough one! Math Please continue working on basic facts at home. They are essential to the topics we studying in 4th and 5th grade math. We are moving forward with learning about multiplication. Science We will be wrapping up our study of water and moving on to the soil study. We will be working in the space for our garden. If you have gardening gloves and /or small shovels, it would be great if you were willing to let your student bring them in for our work. We will be outside a couple of times this week, weather permitting. Thank you!
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Special Announcements I know that many of the students in the class are interested in making videos and movies. I came across this cool opportunity and wanted to share it with you. Tomorrow is Pumpkin Carving Night! It is $10 per person. Dinner for the family and a pumpkin for each child is included. It is a ton of fun and the kids are super excited. Let Mrs Orzoff know ASAP if you plan to attend. We will be attending a musical at the Youtheater in Skokie on Tuesday. I am sending a flyer home today. Please send $10 in by Monday, October 24. We will eat lunch at school upon our return. Carnival is next Friday, October 28. Costumes may be worn to school in the morning, as is traditional for the 4th graders only. Be aware that costumes will be worn to lunch and recess. They may change before we go to Carnival, if they would like. Please send $10 in for tickets by Thursday, October 27th. I am noticing a need to work on typing skills. This is a great page where your student can set up an account and keep track of their progress. You may see it come home as homework... Go to the resources page and scroll down to the bottom for the link. LA October brings the realistic fiction genre study. We have begun our small group book studies. It is a chance to work in small groups to work on specific strategies good readers use. Each group is responsible for reading independently between meetings. We have also started reading Eight Keys as a whole group to introduce new literary devices and terms. The nonfiction unit will be wrapped up with a memoir project. The students will be writing a short memoir, including nonfiction text structures and utilizing text features to tell their story. It will be presented in their choice of multimedia. If they come asking for artifacts or pictures, they can be sent via email. Math The addition and subtraction unit was wrapped up last week. We have been working on ways to show multiplication and the area model of multiplication this week. Please continue to practice basic math facts when you need to have a little family fun! Science We will talking about soil quality soon. Please send in any gardening shovels you may have at home. We will be working on preparing our garden for spring. Computer Science & Studio Lab We had a special guest speak with our class on Monday. Debi Lewis is a website designer. She spoke with the class about the purpose of websites, how to market your clientele and showed a little bit of HTML code. The students asked great questions and learned a lot that they will apply when they design their blogs. We worked on conditionals in Computer Science. The students are welcome to login to code.org and work any time they wish. They will need to login to their Roycemore Google account first. I am so impressed by how quickly everyone embraced the research portion of Studio Lab. Everyone is learning so many new things, I can hardly keep up with them! Some students are ready to bring in materials to work next Wednesday. I can store materials in the classroom. They do not need to go back and forth. Special announcements: *Wednesday, October 12 there will be no school due to Yom Kippur. EDP camp is available. Please preregister using the form from Mrs. Orzoff's email. *Friday, October 21 5:30-7:00 is our pumpkin carving night. We hope to see you there!! *Tuesday, October 25 will be our first field trip of the year. We will be going to see a show called Operation Lunch Line at the North Shore Center for Performing Arts, which will help us work on Sharpen the Saw! Let me know if you are interested in coming along. *Friday, October 28 is the annual Carnival run by the Upper School students for our Lower School students. More info to come. It is super fun and one of the highlights of the year! I am noticing a need to work on typing skills. This is a great page where your student can set up an account and keep track of their progress. You may see it come home as homework... Go to the resources page and scroll down to the bottom for the link. LA Memoirs full of microstories! Everyone is working on brainstorming and writing microstories for the first writing project. The stories will be told or written in Adobe Spark. Your child may be asking you for pictures or other artifacts too support their writing. If you do not want to send in items or artifacts, please take a picture. Pictures can always be emailed to me and I will share with their Google Drive. There was no Roots test last week. We will be reviewing the first three lessons this week and a test will be given Friday. Math Everyone completed the first unit math test on Friday. The next unit of study is multiplication. Please continue to work on basic facts. It is essential to math understanding from here on out. A quick Google search for multiplication math games will produce many choices. Also feel free to use old fashioned flashcards or games to keep up the practice. Science Water is a an important natural resource. We learned about the Water Cycle and scarcity of freshwater on the Earth. The students also designed, built and tested their own watersheds on Friday. Check out the pictures below. It was a lot of fun! Computer Science & Studio Lab We worked on debugging and looking for patterns to loop in Computer Science. The students are welcome to login to code.org and work any time they wish. They will need to login to their Roycemore Google account first. I am so impressed by how quickly everyone embraced the research portion of Studio Lab. Everyone is learning so many new things, I can hardly keep up with them! |