Good morning, 4th grade families. Hope this finds you all well. We had an excellent first week with your children! The procedures and schedules are becoming more routine each day and we're ready to start introducing more curriculum this coming week. Before I tell you about that, I wanted to share a little about my weekend. (This is where you can scroll on down to the content portion if you like).

Last night my sisters and their spouses stopped by before heading to the theater. We always have a blast when we're together. My husband, Dave, and I then went to a memorial service for a priest who recently passed away. He was the pastor at the church we both attended when we were teens, even though we didn't know each other until after high school. From there we dropped in at a party some friends hosted for old Tempe Prep families. We had many good years at that school and formed some incredible friendships. Today, I'm going to do  my regular Saturday work around the house and shopping for the week, but then one of my sisters is going to come back over for dinner. I think we're going to do something special like crab legs! I'm going to pitch the idea that I need to celebrate surviving my first week. Haha! Tomorrow, we'll celebrate my son-in-law's birthday with a nice steak dinner here. All my kids will be here, so that will be the highlight of the week for me. You'll find that it doesn't matter how old they get, you'll always be happy to see your children and spend time with them. You'll also discover that my weekends usually revolve around family and food, and not necessarily in that order.

Okay, now let's take a look at the upcoming week.

Language Arts
     Grammar - We will be learning about nouns and how to make them plural this week. We'll also introduce the daily gram. This is something we'll do every day with the kids. It's a short editing exercise to help the students recognize and correct errors, so they will more easily be able to edit their own work.

     Spalding - We will be creating their notebooks for the first few weeks of class. After that you can expect to see the regular lists of words coming home. You'll be happy, as will the students, to learn that we've made a change with regard to the homework. You will only have to dictate the words once and then only the words that are incorrect will have to be dictated and written two more times! It's going to make a huge difference in the amount of time it takes for most of the students.

     Literature - We began The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and will read chapters 3-7 this week focusing on characterization and sequencing of events.

     Poetry - This week we'll begin memorizing our first poem, "Afternoon on a Hill" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The students will have two weeks to memorize the poem and then each will recite it in front of their classes.

     Writing With Ease - We still have several families from each class who have not purchased this item. This is a copyrighted curriculum and we are not allowed to make photocopies of the pages. The packet needs to be purchased as soon as possible, please. We will begin working with these on Monday. Teachers will project the pages for students who don't have it, but it is not ideal to do this because there are multiple pages and students will need to refer back to the text to write their summaries.

Math - We had a fun week of review and games, but this week we will get into the 4A textbooks and workbooks. Most of the students have these books already, but if your child doesn't, they will need them this week. Our first unit is number sense, place value, and working with digits up to one million. Homework in the workbook will begin Monday.

Science - We enjoyed a few different activities in class last week as we learned about the scientific method. We're learning about the different variables in experiments and this week we'll talk through several different experiments, having the students identify the steps they would take and which things would be the independent, dependent, and controlled variables. We'll do one more hands-on experiment in class on Wednesday.

History - We are learning about maps and the kids learned about latitude and map scale last week. This week we'll move on to longitude and finding places on a map.

I think that's it. Thank you to everyone who helped us out with our wish list items! I think we're in pretty good shape for a while. Have a fabulous weekend with your families!