Ms. Richardson's Fourth Grade Class

Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven -  about alliteration and assonance;  Hurricane Sandy.

Please remember that the book orders for November are actually due this Thursday.  All catalogs are also available online.  If you would like to order a book for your child for a present, please let me know and I can send it home discreetly.  I'll be doing one more order before the winter break!

Ask your child today about:  arrays, the article on eating insects... did they think it was gross?

Today ask your students about:  coordinate grids, what they discovered about advertising, last day of electives.

Hello and welcome to the blog!  I hope to post here weekly, please come back periodically and look.  Important and urgent reminders will be sent out via email.

Please check out the photos page.  I'll be putting pictures on there occasionally.  Also, if you have taken pictures, I'd love to put them on the page for others to see.

Also take a look at the student blog!  This has been intermittent, but ongoing.

This week we have had a lot going on.  We have edited, revised and published our Mean Teacher essays.  Thank you for giving your kids feedback.  I hope you enjoyed their essays.   Our first grade buddies got a kick out of them too, it was cool for me to see our kids have a little giggling audience.  Next we will be writing a short mystery and discuss introductions and conclusions.
In reading we are looking at extracting the main idea out of a story and also looking at how writers set up introductions of stories.  On a related note, I have updated the reading log, it should be easier to understand for the students, and better organized for me too. 
In math we are finishing up decimals and number concepts and moving on to multiplication and fact families.  We will also be looking at multiplication this week by making arrays.  Some concepts we will touch on as well are area, perimeter, simple fractions, square, prime and composite numbers.  In addition we continue to build thinking about numbers by solving daily word problems.
In social studies we are finishing up learning and applying knowledge about Texas regions.  We are going to make a commercial for each of the regions and then edit it using iMovie.  The students have been learning how to use iMovie in computer lab, as well as how to use a green screen!  We will be writing and editing our commercials this week. 
Next week in science we will be beginning ecosystems!

Something to ask your children about today:  Dynamic Equilibrium!  If they get stuck, as them about the math game and also our science discussion on systems.

Some important dates:
Next Wednesday, October 31st, students may bring PJ's to school.  We will be changing into them or putting them over our clothes to meet with our buddy class.  Please do not send your child to school in pajamas as we will only be wearing them for a couple of hours at most.  Also your child may bring a favorite picture book to share with a buddy as well as a small snack.  If making healthy holiday-themed snacks is your thing, you may send some to share with our buddy class as well.  It should be a lot of fun.  I look forward to posting pictures.

November 30th is our first field trip of the year and it is a science trip to the Redbud Center.  If you are interested in coming along, please contact me or a homeroom parent to volunteer.  We are also scheduling the rest of the field trips for the year and will post the dates as they are booked. 

Thank you for reading!
Stacey Richardson