Text Box: Crumbs class to learn about our countries government.  Students will learn about the three branches of government and will create bills that can either be passed or vetoed.  This is a class that my students have always loved! 1/2 hour of Power:  We just finished our unit on comparing numbers, rounding and decimals.  We will begin our new 1/2 hour of power this week with a focus on addition and subtraction.  

Text Box: We have been up to a lot this past month. Reading:  We are still reading Hatchet as a class.  We have been focusing on predicting, cause and effect, and summarizing.  We have also been working on our reading fluency.  About 1-2 times per week, all students work on Read Naturally.  This is a program that focuses on fluency practice and comprehension. Writing:In writing, we’re in the middle of completing our Fall District Writing Prompt, which will be scored by another 4th grade teacher.  We should have the results by fall conferences.  Students have been focusing on improving their “ideas” and “organization” (two of the

Text Box: “Six Traits of Writing”) and how to use commas correctly.  Math:  We just started a new unit “Landmarks in the Thousands”.  This unit focuses on exploring the structure of our number system though activities involving hundreds and thousands.  They explore factors, important landmarks with numbers to help students solve addition and subtraction problems.  Students will also play games and solve problems that focus on what happens when we add or subtract multiples of 10 and 100.  Students will develop a sense of the relative sizes of 100, 1,000 and 10,000. Science:  Students are finishing up Science with Mrs. Scott this week and will go over to Mr.

Text Box: Can you believe it?  Our class won this year’s Walk-A-Thon’s spirit award.  Yippie!  We get to hold on to the trophy that has our class name engraved on the front of it and we also get a class pizza party.  We will have the pizza party next week.  I will send home a reminder.  Way to Go Gjurasic’s!    

Text Box: We reached our reading goal of 12,000 reading minutes this month.  We will celebrate with a read-in, this Friday, November

Text Box: 7th.  After looking at students reading minutes, we decided that starting next month, ALL students need to have read at least 400 minutes in the month to participate in the read-in.  If students do not have their 400 minutes read, they will be going to another class while the rest of the class has the read-in.  If we work together, everyone can enjoy the read-in.  Working together pays off in the end!

Text Box: November 2008