Week of 12/7

Hi Everyone,

     Students will be bringing home progress reports for the second nine weeks on this Tuesday. Please review the grades with your child and discuss with them what areas they think that they need to improve. Goal setting is great way for students to feel involved in the learning process. Please also remind them that my room is open most mornings. They can come in to work on their class projects, complete their i-Ready work, or to get extra help on things that we are working on in class. Please send back the bottom of the progress reports no later than Friday.

     This Friday evening JBE will have our first ever Taste of the World event. Students can participate in activities from around the world and even have a small taste from featured countries. I hope that you can attend this very fun sounding event. Stop by my classroom to make a lantern.

     On Monday and Tuesday students will complete two testing sessions of our Mid-Year Math Scrimmage. The test will cover various topics in 4th grade math. The students will answer questions that cover content that we have learned about and things that we have yet to cover. For the rest of the week we will begin learning about division. In 4th grade students will learn various strategies for solving division problems. However we will not learn the long division algorithm. Students will not be responsible for knowing how to use the algorithm until 6th grade. In fourth grade students need to be able to successfully find whole-number quotients and remainders with up to four-digit dividends and one-digit divisors. 
The strategies that we will use include:
*Multiplying Up or Using Multiplication Facts that we Know

*Array Model

*Area Model

*Partial Quotients

This week our work will focus on Multiplying Up, The Array Model and the Area Model.

     This week in science we will continue our work on energy. This week we will learn about thermal energy. Did you know that all matter has thermal energy? Thermal energy normally thought of as heat is actually a measure of the amount of energy that the particles of matter have. Even objects that we think of as being cold have thermal energy. An iceberg actually has more thermal energy than a pot of boiling water. Students will learn about the three ways that heat is transferred-radiation, convection, and conduction.