This Week in Grade 4

Hello everybody!  Thanks as always for checking in with us here at Discovery's Grade 4 blog.  Here's to another fun-filled week!

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS:

This Wednesday will be an early release day as Discovery School teachers have their monthly professional development afternoon.

MAP ON SITE TEACHER TRAINING

In our constant quest for growth and excellence, and in following with the recommendations of our 2010 SACS Accreditation Team, our faculty has embraced numerous projects and training to raise the academic level of our curriculum, to incorporate the proven teaching methods into our lessons, to stay current with international teaching practices, and to improve the assessment, reporting, and documentation systems for our students and parents.

Our teachers have been using the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) as a tool for not only validating our school curriculum, but also for adapting levels of instruction, differentiating for our diverse student population, and maximizing student learning in the classroom. On Thursday, September 6 and Friday, September 7 we have arranged for our teachers to participate in an on-site training with a MAP specialist brought down from Northwest Education Association (NWEA). For this training, all Elementary teachers some of the Secondary teachers will attend. Because of that,

there will be NO school for grades Nursery to Grade 5 on Thursday and Friday, September 6 and 7.

Our teachers are making the necessary accommodations in the delivery of the curriculum to make sure that this does not affect the instruction of our students. As only a few of the secondary teachers will attend the training,

the Middle and High School students will have classes as normal on Thursday and Friday, September 6 and 7.

We thank our parents for their support and understanding in this matter, and encourage anyone who has a question to email our Head of School at debgilespk@yahoo.com

THIS WEEK'S CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES:

Math:   In Math lessons this week we will be beginning our addition and subtraction unit.  First, we will  be learning some mental math strategies that will make it easier to add and subtract numbers in our head quickly.  We will move into the estimation of sums and differences, before finishing off with practicing adding whole numbers using the classic algorhythm method.

Reading and Writing:  Our reading skill this week that we will focus on is making predictions.  The students will be making predictions about the conclusion of our class novel, "Stonefox", and more specific predictions about what they think will happen next in their SSR books.  In writing this week we will have time for some free writing time to continue working on expressing our thoughts and feelings on paper.  We will also be practicing finding our writing 'voice' in a fun-filled writing activity.

Social Studies:  This week we will be making non-linguistic representations of our key vocabulary words from our 'Maps and Globes' unit.  We will also be studying our next two continents, Europe and Asia.

Grammar:  This week we will be practicing how to use verbs in their correct tenses and using them to enhance our writing.

Spelling:  This week's focus will be on words with the long i sound.

Thanks as always for reading!!   Here's to a great week!!

Jordan and Karen