Canoe Island (Outdoor School):

For those not familiar with the trip, Canoe Island is our 5th grade outdoor school experience, located in the San Juan Islands in Washington State.  We have two meetings scheduled in February and March for planning:

— Thursday, February 21, from 6:00 – 6:30 pm in Room 1.  Please come to this meeting if you are interested in volunteering to help organize parts of the trip.  This is not a meeting for potential chaperones.  

— Tuesday, March 19, from 6:00 – 7:00 pm in Room 1.  Every family is invited to this information session to learn more about costs, expectations, and outcomes for students.  Please make every effort to attend– we can/t wait to tell you more about the trip!

Please don’t hesitate to be in touch with Principal Courtney if you have specific questions.

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 ! 

Congratulations

The following students’ artwork will be displayed at the UO art museum as finalists in the Oregon student art contest.   Come to the museum Feb. 20-April 28 to view these and many other students’ art depicting Oregon.

“Smith Rock” by Annabelle 

“Smith Rock, Oregon” by Lillian

“The Painted Hills” by Adelaide 

“Smith Rock” by Kepri 

“The Wallowas” by Elena 

Homework:

Mme Shelli’s Class:  Students will have nightly math practice for homework.

Mme Jana’s Class:  This week’s vocabulary homework is words that include “e accent grave = è” like la mère, le père, très, etc. Accents are very important in French. Getting the accent wrong can completely change the word. This is a difficult concept for native English speakers, since we have no accents. Here is the homework:  

Important Dates: 

Monday, February 11 – Thursday, February 15 – Artist in residence continues (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): Most students finished  the “J’observe…” writing activity, Le petit îlot , so we were able to begin the next“J’observe…” writing activity, which is called Bangladesh.  We learned where Bangladesh is and discussed climate a bit. We also talked about what to say rather than just “a red sail” (une voile rouge). Instead, you can say, “red like a sunset” (rouge comme le coucher du soleil) or “as red as blood” (aussi rouge que le sang) or other ways to make their writing more interesting.

We did not do our second dictation, but will TRY to squeeze it in next week. The artist-in residence activity is taking up more of our schedule that I imagined, plus it takes a bit of time for us to settle into our new PE/music schedule. We also still need to conjugate special verbs that end in –ir, like finir (to finish) and choisir (to choose). We did reading groups just once this week because of a number of factors, but will get back to doing it twice next week. I think we will keep reading and science on the same days.

Les sciences:  We have not yet gone out onto the Charlemagne campus (too cold/snowy/rainy) and selected several soil types to determine what kind of soils we have in our little corner of the world, but we will do it on the next weather-appropriate days. Mme Shelli and Victor are taking the kids on the field trip visit to the museum to explore rocks and support our science unit. I elected to stay here so that the kids will get French that day. (Okay, plus I hate field trips, and Shelli is really nice.)

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

English Language Arts:  We’re going to “dig in” to reading this week.  Early in the week we’ll be reading about rocks & soil to prepare for our field trip.  Then on Thursday & Friday students will choose a non-fiction text about other things people have “dug up.” Texts about dinosaurs, Pompeii & Tutankhamen will surely be interesting for students to read about.

Math: We will continue to work on decimal notation in Unit 6.  Here’s a sample of one lesson. Students will be converting fractions with ten or hundred in the denominator to  decimals through the hundreds place.  They will solve a variety of complex problems such as this one.