Field Trip February 13:

We will go to the UO Museum of Natural & Cultural history to learn more about the rock cycle. This ties into our science unit.  Blue class: 8:45-10:45am Red Class: 12:30-2:30. UPDATE: Thank you for parents who volunteered.  We have enough chaperones.

 

How we handle Valentines in 4th grade:

We have a longstanding tradition in 4th grade that we make our own Valentine cards at school. So, PLEASE, do not send your child to school with Valentines for each student because we don’t include time to hand out individual cards. Here’s what we do: The day or so before Valentine’s Day, each child makes and decorates an 11″ x 17″ piece of construction paper with her name on it. On Valentine’s Day, we open the doors between the two 4th grade rooms, and every child gets to sign every other child’s card, and in turn, each child has his card signed by everyone. It’s always lots of fun both making (Okay, kind of hectic…) and signing the cards. I even get out my hoard of glitter ! 

PE/Weather:

Our PE days are now on Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the year, so please make sure your child comes to school, those days particularly, wearing the proper footwear. Also, please send your kids to school with the right outerwear (coats, raincoats, sweatshirts, proper shoes, etc.), as we have outdoor recess unless it’s really raining pretty hard.

Homework:

Mme Shelli’s Class:  Students will practice months of the year and writing dates for homework.  Please verify that your child knows the months in order in English.  If they do, ask them to tell you in French. They should since they worked on these a lot the last few weeks on the French side.

Mme Jana’s Class:  We will be doing our French vocabulary quiz on Monday this week, and there will be no homework in French. We will continue to work on last week’s expressions with avoir and next week’s words that include “e accent grave = è” like la mère, le père, très, etc.

Important Dates: 

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

Wednesday, February 13 – 4th grade field trip to UO Museum

Thursday, February 14 – We sign one another’s cards for Valentine’s Day!

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

Thursday, March 7 – Science Fair! (after school)

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):  We will hopefully finish the latest “J’observe…” writing activity, Le petit îlot , but will not begin a new one until everyone is caught up. (We will be a bit time crunched with the group mural project, but it promises to be worthwhile.)

We did not do our second dictation, but will squeeze it in this week. We will conjugate special verbs that end in –ir, like finir (to finish) and choisir (to choose), which are conjugated differently than venir (to come) and tenir (to hold). Many kids seem like they’re ready to handle another verb tense, so we may add “passé composé” pretty soon, one of the many, many French verb tenses. We have to be forgiving with verbs because verb conjugating in French is pretty complicated, and it takes a significant amount of practice to master it. So, we’ll keep working at verbs, and so will every other French teacher your child will ever have. 

I’m not yet sure if we’ll continue to do Reading groups on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Since our music/PE schedule switches to Monday and Wednesday this week, changing not only the days of the week, but also the times we have music and PE, I want to let it all shake down before I finalize science and reading group days. I will  likely know by the end of this week or next, and I will keep you posted. Certainly, we will have reading groups twice a week, and we will have sciences twice a week.

Les sciences:  We began the science unit with describing what we can SEE (not what we assume) with four different soil types (les sols). On Thursday, we added water to those soil samples and agitated the vials, so we will have nicely settled soil samples by Monday. Students will draw the layers the materials separate into, and will learn the names of  the components of soils: hummus (l’humus), sand (le sable),  clay (l’argile), silt (le limon), small rocks (les cailloux) and begin to learn about them all. We will also go out onto the Charlemagne campus and select several soil types to determine what kind of soils we have in our little corner of the world.

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

English Language Arts:  Look for your child’s science fiction narrative to come home on Monday.  Ask your child to read it to you.  It is our first narrative writing project this year, so it may not be perfect, but students have been working on paragraphing, writing dialog correctly and adding descriptive words.

Math: Please look for your child’s Unit 5 Assessment on Understanding Fraction Equivalence and Comparison. Students should now be able to find common denominators and apply other strategies to compare and add/ subtract fractions. Here’s a sample of some the reasoning and thinking that is happening in class. 

Next, students will use their understanding of fractions to understand decimal notation in Unit 6.  Here’s a sample of one lesson.