le 3 au 7 octobre 2022

Upcoming Dates:

  • Friday, October 14:  NO SCHOOL (Professional Development)

Parent Volunteer Opportunity

As we study the human heart and circulatory system in English class, we would love to invite one or two medical professionals to share with the class. Do you work in the medical field and have some knowledge and experience working with the heart?  If you would have time for a short class visit, please email Shelli at hopper_s@4j.lane.edu.

 

What’s up! Quoi de neuf?

Please make sure to send your child to school in proper footwear and a water-repellent jacket when the weather is threatening. Students will go out to recess unless the principal decides that the weather or air quality prevents it. If your child is ill, or has had a fever or vomited within the previous 24 hours, please keep her/him home. Please continue to follow current Covid rules as well. If your child will be absent, please email both teachers (kincaid_j@4j.lane.edu and hopper_s@4j.lane.edu) and Bernadette (conover_b@4j.lane.edu) or please call in and leave a message on the school line (541) 790-7080.

Our French intern:

We are delighted and so lucky to present our French Amity intern, Lisa Himpens, who will be working in 4th and 5th grades this year. She joins us from the region of Picardie in the north of France. This is her first experience in the United States, and we encourage families to include her (and our other intern in 2nd & 3rd, Laurine) on an excursion somewhere in Oregon. Or maybe invite them to visit the coast with you, go on a hike, or invite them to a homemade dinner or a local dinner out? If you’re interested, please reach out to Mme Jana or Mme Shelli via email, and we will put you in contact with Lisa. Merci!

Le français:

Mme Jana, French & Science kincaid_j@4j.lane.edu

•We do our best to express ourselves in French.

•We continue to learn how to use a translating dictionary.

•We have a positive attitude and growth mindset.

This past week, your children and I met to work on our classroom code, which is about how we want the classroom to feel. I make a poster of our agreements, and we all sign them.

We continue our cursive writing instruction with the letters o, w, b, & v, which aren’t difficult to form but can be confusing to attach to the next letter. We have five more lowercase (minuscule) letters, then we’ll begin uppercase (majuscule) letters and work on writing signatures. All the assessments are completed, thanks so much to Lisa being able to take kids a few at a time to record their speaking assessments. We don’t do these assessments again until the end of January. Yay! They give me a lot of information, but they do take time. Now I just have to grade them all!

We begin French homework this week! At school, I will explain the homework & give the students the first answer for each evening’s work. Students will come home with a lavender sheet of paper. This paper must go back and forth from school to home every day, which is why it should reside in your child’s homework folder. One-fourth of the paper is done each night. Monday night, they rewrite the vocabulary words with vowels in one color and consonants in another. Tuesday night, they rewrite the words in cursive. Wednesday night, they will do a fill-in-the-blank activity, and on Thursday night, someone in your house (older siblings who speak French can administer it) a quiz to practice writing the words to ready kids for our Friday quiz. The quiz will also be a fill-in-the-blank (cloze) activity. Your job, parents, is to initial the sheet every evening, only showing that you saw they did the work, not that they necessarily did it 100% correctly. We will grade homework together every day. On Friday, there will be an in-class quiz, which is also a cloze activity. They get one grade for spelling and one grade for vocabulary. I try to minimize the stress.

Last week, we conjugated the verb avoir (to have), which most students seem to remember. Next week, we’ll conjugate être (to be), then faire (to make or do), and aller (to go). After that, we usually do verbs ending in -er (90% of verbs), then pouvoir (to be able) and vouloir (to want). 

In the coming weeks, we will be working on some activities to help kids better understand how to use our translating dictionaries. It is a great help also in reinforcing alphabetical order.

We’ll begin reading and FLA groups in the second week of October. 

Students worked a bit on their “Tubes” art this week, and we began the “Moi!” project which is all about them… in French. Nearly everyone has filled out his/her/their document, and now we’re working on some art. Next, they’ll write their paragraphs in cursive and put the art and the writing together.

Les sciences:  

We will begin our first science experiment in the Soils, Rocks, and Landforms (La terre, les pierres, et les formes du relief) unit next week, learning about the components of soil.

 

Mme Shelli, English & Math
hopper_s@4j.lane.edu

“Applying Place Value Concepts in Whole Number Addition and    Subtraction.” The key concepts in this unit are:

  • We can estimate addition and subtraction to decide if our exact answer is reasonable.
  • There are multiple strategies for adding and subtracting numbers. One efficient strategy is the “standard algorithm.”

This week, we will continue to use rounding to estimate approximate sums and differences as a way to check our calculations. Students enter 4th grade with lots of experience adding and subtracting with strategies and varying experience with the standard algorithm. Last week, students practiced the standard method for adding with “carrying” or “regrouping.” This week, students will see modeled subtraction of multi-digit numbers using base ten blocks as a way to understand what happens when we “borrow” or “regroup” in subtraction.  There will be practice time and games to support fluency in this addition and subtraction.

GAMES of of the week:  Subtraction games to play at home

English:

 

In our ELA Module 1 A Great Heart, we begin a two week study of the literal heart. We will read the wonderfully complex text, Circulatory Story. Some of the goals of this week’s work will be determine the main idea and details, summarize, and determine meaning of metaphors and similes in the text.   You can find out details about our first unit “A Great Heart” on this Parent Tip Sheet .You can learn more about the 4th grade curriculum here.