Thank you parents for attending parent-teacher conferences!  We very much enjoyed talking with you. We hope you took time to look through your child’s work, which was set out on student desks in Mme Shelli’s room. In future, you are welcome before or after school anytime to come look through student journals. (If you come in the morning, please be aware that we are prepping for the day & won’t be able to stop and talk, and that we do expect students to be ready to begin their day promptly at 8h30.) Also, please take time to look at SeeSaw updates as they come to you to see/hear how your child is progressing in class. If you have further questions about your child’s growth in 4th grade, remember that we are available by email or to meet by appointment.

At conferences, several families let us know they will be out of town the week before Winter Break. If you fall into this category, please let us both and Bernadette know about your plans so it’s officially in the system. Please do this any time your child won’t be in class. It helps us tremendously with planning. Merci!

Homework:

Mme Shelli’s Class: There is wordstudy homework this week.  Students should complete nightly homework & bring it to school each day. The spelling pattern we will study this week is doubling consonants before suffix endings.

Dreambox math is an optional home activity for individualized, leveled math practice and is paid for by the school district. Students can login with their school passwords. Studies show that students who use Dreambox 60+ minutes per week in addition to regular classroom instruction make great gains in their math understanding.

Mme Jana’s Class:  Our homework from last week has extended into this week. Tuesday and Wednesday nights (November 15 & 16) will have homework, and we’ll conclude the study with a quiz on Thursday. This vocabulary work is comprised of words the students often use, but often misspell. Here is the homework, just in case it doesn’t come home one night: mots de base 3 2018 Vocab

Important Dates: 

Monday, Nov 12      NO SCHOOL, Veterans Day

Thursday, Nov 15   Picture RETAKES

Friday, Nov 16       PTO Trivia Night!

Thursday & Friday, Nov 22 & 23     NO SCHOOL, Thanksgiving Break

Mme Jana’s News (kincaid_j@4j.lane.edu)

FLA (French Language Arts): 

We are working hard on how to conjugate verbs within sentences, not as easy as it may seem. We’ll do another exercise this week, and basically keep working on it all year ’til it’s hopefully second nature.

We began a new “J’observe…” last week.  It is a photo of four piglets in a bowler hat on the grass. It’s been challenging to only write “cute” (mignon) one time, but fortunately, the word “adorable” (adorable) showed up to save us. Many students have now completed all three of the “J’observe…” activities, but a few students haven’t completed any of them. My expectation is that when there is free work time, if students have completed the day’s work, they use their remaining time to catch up on things like this. They have more personal responsibility for their work this year, and have to be proactive about completing work.

If you didn’t take your child’s “Moi” project in French down from the wall at parent/teacher conferences, it will be coming home this week. They did such a great job on these.

Les sciences:  We will work on series and parallel circuits this week and next. 


Mme Shelli’s News (hopper_s@4j.lane.edu)

English Language Arts:  Integrating English language arts and Oregon history, and with their new understanding of various regions of Oregon, students will begin to learn about how Oregon’s Native people survived off the land.  This week, students will select a native people group to research in class.  On Friday, they will come home with a project assignment to complete over the next three weeks to accompany their writing done in class.

Math: Our current unit is Multiplication and Division Strategies with larger numbers.  We will be continuing to use “Partial Quotients” model for division.  This week we will relate multiplication and division by solving problems with area and perimeter.  Partial quotient division is probably different from the way most  learned to divide, so please watch this video to learn more about this strategy. 

In 4th grade our goal is to have students build a deep understanding of multiplying and dividing before learning the traditional methods which can be confusing.  Don’t worry, in 5th grade, students will learn the standard algorithm.