le 4 au 7 février 2025Upcoming Dates
Monday, February 3 – NO SCHOOL, Professional Development & Transition Day
Monday, February 17 – NO SCHOOL, Presidents’ Day
Friday, February 21 – 5:30-7:30 Carnaval! (More info coming soon.)
Please ensure that you email BOTH TEACHERS when you communicate with us.
(kincaid_j@4j.lane.edu and hopper_s@4j.lane.edu)
Le français
Jana Kincaid, French and Science kincaid_j@4j.lane.edu
This week’s French homework corresponds to the geography we’re learning in French. Here is a copy: fév 2025 géographie vocab
Here are the words spelled and translated:
Here are the words read with time for students to use for the home test on Thursday night:
We did not work on our writing project this past week, we instead began geography. We will continue with our “J’observe…” activity this week of “Les canetons.”
We had our second buddy time on Thursday, and I once again forgot to take photos! They did a getting-to-know each other activity. We see our buddies again Thursday after this.
We are nearing the end of cursive instruction, probably another couple of weeks, and then we’ll use cursive on our writing assignments.
Student goal: I can find grammatical and punctuation errors in sentences in French.
Student goal: I can form lowercase and uppercase letters correctly in cursive.
La géographie
We began studying geography (la géographie) as an introduction to the large Francophone (French-speaking) country project we do in the spring. We are identifying continents, major oceans, discussing the difference between cities, states, countries, and continents. We’ll be discussing border countries and bodies of water, the compass rose, and cardinal points.
Student goal: I can name the four cardinal points and label the major oceans and continents of the world in French.
Les sciences
We have finished up the Soils, Rocks, and Landforms unit and twice brought in rock collections to share. Your child’s science quiz came home last week. It was open-journal, with an offer to use my journal if a student was so inclined, and the average score was 75%. Some of the students who did poorly didn’t use their resources or didn’t use good test-taking skills. I learned that we need to work more on how to take a quiz. We will begin our new science unit, Energy (l’Énergie) in a week or so.
Mme Shelli hopper_s@4j.lane.edu English & Math teacher
Math
NO Math homework this week
Look for a short “checkpoint” quiz in your child’s home folder on Tuesday. Students were to show their understanding of adding and subtracting fractions and mixed numbers.
We will continue Illustrative Math Unit 3: Extending Operations to Fractions. The last section (5-6 lessons) of this unit makes a connection of fractions with decimals. The activities will tie understanding of fractions to place value in our base-ten system and decimal fractions.
Here’s a short family support video to explain our current unit.
English
Our current English Language Arts unit: EXTREME SETTINGS
To start the week, we will read and analyze the last portion of complex non-fiction text, Mountains, by Seymour Simon. We will focus on some complex vocabulary in the text as well as identifying the way the text is structured by identifying the text’s main idea and details. Starting mid week, students will do a group research project to learn about several of the worlds tallest and longest mountain ranges. They will present their findings to the class.
Later this month, the information and all of the narrative writing skills we’ve been practicing will be put to use as students write a survival fiction story set in a major mountain range of the world.
Find out more about 4j’s 4th Grade English Curriculum. This fact sheet for parents also includes a full list of the texts we’ll read as well as additional texts that can be read at home to extend your child’s learning.
OBOB practice
Students who are involved in OBOB will begin team “battles” during lunch each day this week.
The battles are 100% randomly chosen upfront by a bracket maker machine. This guarantees that there is no subjective scheduling, but also means that your child will battle grade levels other than their own. It is is 3-5 mixed competition with one winning team from each school.
This year, regionals are a bit different. 4J will be holding their own regionals on Saturday, March 15. 4j will send the winner of each grade band to the state competition.
If you are an approved OBOB volunteer, you will be receiving an email with sign-ups for the battles. If you have any specific questions, please email Ginger Topize at topize_g@4j.lane.edu.
Reminders:
Healthy and Nut Free Snacks
PE & Recess
At recess, students will be outside even in drizzle. So please have your child wear layers and a jacket or hat during rainy, cool weather. Also, students need secure and sturdy shoes on PE Days:
Blue Class PE & Library days: Monday & Thursday Red Class PE & Library days: Tuesday & FridayDecember 9-13, 2024
The “Moi!” projects were sent home this week past week. Hopefully you were able to have your child explain the project to you and all the work that went into it. If your child did not complete the project, it should still have come home in parts, which may be completed and assembled at home, then brought back to school, completed, for full credit.
We are working on the “J’observe…” writing assignment with the photo at left entitled, “Je grimpe..” (I climb/I am climbing.) We are working on creating similes, and I was quite impressed with their abilities. We’ll move on to a new photo next week.