CLASSROOM INFORMATION
BREAKFAST, SNACK, AND LUNCH
The most important meal of the day is breakfast. Please send your kid to school with the proper nutrition necessary to aid in their learning experience. Make sure your kid brings snack and lunch meals and a water bottle every day to school.
HOMEWORK
Almost every night your child will have a Reading and Math Homework. The Reading homework will be most nights simply just to read from 20-30 minutes every night of the book they are currently reading. EACH STUDENT SHOULD HAVE A BOOK AT HOME AND IN CLASS. THIS BOOK GOES EVERY NIGHT HOME AND MUST COME BACK EVERY DAY IN THEIR BAGS. The Math homework will likely a photocopied page from the day’s math lesson. The Spelling homework will be due each Friday and will be completed in their spelling notebooks. There will also be theme and writing projects that may require parental assistance and/or computer internet access. Please provide your child with a special place to do their homework and work to help them set up routines at home for completing assignments.
Your child will have a “Learning Log”. It is a small blue book where they record their homework each night. Please refer to it in case you have any question about homework. This log comes to school and goes home every day.
READING
We will focus a lot of time in classroom and strengthening your child’s English reading skills and helping them on the path of becoming a lifelong reader. In the class there are to main ways of teaching reading: the first is called reader’s workshop where the students will work on becoming better readers while reading independently and responding in written and oral form to the different texts that they read. The second is through guided reading where the class or groups within the class will read the same text together while thinking and discussing what they read and practicing skills that will improve their appreciation and comprehension.
WRITING/GRAMMAR/SPELLING
For our writing periods the class will spend most of the time in sessions called writer’s workshop. In these periods I will give the students lessons on how to write effectively in English, and then give them the freedom to write and practice lessons in their writer’s notebook. There will be some whole-class writing assignments that will give them, but the majority of periods the students will be encouraged to write things that are interesting to them, and things that they can share with me and their classmates.
Grammar lessons will focus on the student’s learning important grammar rules and learning how to craft quality sentences and paragraphs.
Spelling lessons will work on building the student’s vocabulary grasp of the confusing rules of spelling properly in the English language. The lessons will introduce fifteen new words each Monday, the students then have until Friday morning to craft five good sentences, using 5 of the 15 words and draw 5 pictures that demonstrate their understanding of 5 other words. They will also be quizzed on the entire 15 words that morning.
MATH
Our Math program follows the well-renowned Scott Foresman /Addison Wesley Grade 4 Math program. We will b following this program and covering roughly one lesson per one hour class session. The students will have a follow-up homework assignment each evening that allows them to review and practice what they learned in class that day. There will be a test at the end of each chapter, and quizzes periodically to assess the student’s learning. We are planning to cover 3 chapters each quarter.
THEME
Our theme unit is divided in to sections, Social Studies and Science. I plan to alternate these two sections to make it easier for the students to focus and keep our classroom from getting too crowded with projects and homework assignments. There will be one Social Studies Unit and one Science unit that we will learn about per quarter.
CHARACTER STUDIES
We are planning to devote one period a week and fostering quality character traits within each student. The traits will focus on concepts such as: respect, honesty, responsibility, fairness, friendship, and diligence. These lessons will focus on what it means to be a good person as well as a good student.
CLASS RULES
1) RESPECT YOUR TEACHER
2) RESPECT YOUR CLASSMATES
3) ALWAYS TRY
4) NO WHINING
Please refer to the elementary discipline plan for an understanding of the consequences to rule breaking and other negative behaviour.
Also more detailed information is available on the parents student handbook.
