Homework:

Mme Shelli’s Class:  There is math review homework each evening this week. We correct and discuss it daily, so students should bring it everyday.

Mme Jana’s Class:  This week’s French homework is expressions using the verb avoir (to have). In French, you “have hunger” (J’ai faim.), you “have thirst” (J’ai soif.), and you have your age (J’ai dix ans.) Even though the kids have heard all of these expressions, they have a hard time incorporating them correctly, so we’re going to work on them. I’ve also included some negation, i.e. in French, to say, “I don’t know,” we say “Je ne sais pas.” The word sais is the verb and you put the ne and the pas on each side of the verb. Here is the homework:  avoir faim 2018 Vocab

Important Dates: 

Friday, February 1 –  Grading Day – No School

Monday, February 4 – Artist in residence this week and next (Making a mural.)

Monday, February 18 – No School (Presidents Day)

Sunday, February 24 – The Little French School presents French Night Out from 5-8 p.m. Help support the school!  French Night Out

Friday, March 15 – No School  (Professional Development)

March 25-29 – No School (Spring Break!)

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

FLA (French Language Arts):  French language  tri-annual assessments are essentially complete, and I’ve completed grading and recording them. Now I just have to see what the results tell us!

We began a new “J’observe…” writing activity, Le petit îlot . The photo is of a tiny island between some cliffs with a little red house on it. It’s a gorgeous photo and the kids find the idea intriguing. In one of the sentences, they are meant to guess where the photo was taken. I’ve told them it’s not in the United States, and I’m reading some pretty funny guesses. So, if you know where it is, don’t tell them! I will tell them once everyone has guessed. Also, your lovely children’s writing is really beginning to develop and sound individual, so it’s more fun to write and more fun to read!

We also redid  the first dictation. Some students did much better, and, surprisingly, some students did worse! We will add a new dictation this week, and we’ll see how they do. It’s the kind of activity at which they will improve the more we do them. I know that Mme Anou did dictations with them last year, but this year, they are longer and more complicated, plus they don’t get to hear the dictation before they do it. We are developing our listening skills as well as applying grammar lessons.

We’ll be doing Reading groups on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Our music/PE schedule will switch to Monday and Wednesday beginning the second term, (February 4), so we may have to make some adjustments to what days we do reading and science, but I will keep you posted.

We conjugated three verbs with similar endings, voir (to see), boire (to drink) and croire (to believe). When I instruct about conjugating, I’m always pointing out patterns to help the kids retain general information about conjugating. We write the conjugations in our French journals, and we record them in the table of contents. I’m starting to see kids using the table of contents to look up conjugations and other subjects we’ve recorded. I want the kids to use their resources!

Les sciences:  The science kits arrived on Tuesday (Yay!), so we were able to begin discussing the new unit on Thursday. We will regularly do science on Mondays and Thursdays. Again, our new unit is  Soils, Rocks and Landforms. I learned from the pre-test that these 4th graders have only a vague idea of what soil is made of, and I’m sure they will be fascinated with what they learn. I’ve asked Victor to teach science this term, but I have taught this unit before, so I am here for support.

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

English Language Arts:  This week students will revise and edit their science fiction narratives about how they met an alien. They will work on editing their organized stories to include paragraphs, correct punctuation & spelling, and precise, interesting words. 

In English reading, students will read a fictional text called Me and Uncle Romie (Journeys Les. 8) which features an artist who lived during the Harlem Renaissance period and his nephew.  Our discussions about the text will emphasize analyzing plot and identifying figurative language such as similes and metaphors. We will discuss both visual and performing arts in literature over the next few weeks which ties well into hosting our artist in residence starting next week who will help us make a school mural!

Math: We wrap up a unit on Understanding Fraction Equivalence and Comparison. Students will continue finding common denominators to compare and add/ subtract fractions this week.They will also be making sense and reasoning with fraction.  Here’s a sample of some the reasoning and thinking that is happening in class. It is amazing to hear students in our class explaining their reasoning (similar to those in the video) as they compare fractions! Again, the goal of the unit is for students to have a real sense of fractions, not just to apply a random rules without making mathematical sense of what they are doing.

Dreambox Math provides additional, leveled math practice at home and in class. There are also several other math resources for kids to try at home under the math tab on this site.