School House Rock!

Mrs. Postle will be coming into our classroom each Friday morning to teach the songs and movements to "School House Rock," the musical that 4th grade will put on this spring.  That date is April 15 at 2:00pm.  A little singing, a little showmanship; it's a lot of fun!  Don't be surprised if you begin hearing echoes of "Interplanet Janet" or "Three, is a Magic Number" around the house.

Important Dates

March 5 at 2:30-Wax Museum

March 6-7 - Student-Led Conferences 

March 17-21 - TES Spring Break

March 24-28 - ERB Testing

April 2-4 - 4th grade to Earthshine, Lake Toxaway, NC

Calendar

Tuesday, February 11: Metro School

Wednesday, February 12: Don't Tell Me I Can't Fly at Children's Theatre (rescheduled from 2/12)

(**Mother Nature may have different plans for us on Tuesday and Wednesday. We shall see!**)

Friday, February 14: Valentine's Day, All Trinity Builds Challenge, Half-Day, and NUTS day (whew!)

Monday, February 17: President's Day holiday

Tuesday, February 18: Teacher Workday

Wednesday, February 19: Trading Cards due and rescheduled field trip to Latta Plantation

Wednesday March 5: Wax Museum at 2:30

Thursday, March 6 and Friday, March 7: Student-led conferences

Reader's Workshop

There is such an excited buzz in our classroom each day during Readers' Workshop!  Students are hard at work reading biographies, taking notes, creating graphic organizers, creating trading cards, and writing speeches. We are encouraging the students to do additional research on their chosen historical figure after reading their selected biography. The following website has terrific information.

While working on the biography projects, we are not doing our regular weekly work in the Reader's Notebooks. Students are still reading and recording each night but not doing the vocal and lit studies. We think they have enough work to do on their biography projects!

The Scholastic website has so much amazing information. I'd encourage you to take some time with your child to explore the many resources available. A specific tool that I really like is the Book Wizard. If your child has found a book they really loved, you can enter the title of the book and then click "Similar Books". This is a way to find more books that were similar to the book your child enjoyed.

Science Update

We are on a quest to learn about all the systems of the human body. So far we have discussed the skeletal, muscular, digestive, and circulatory systems. 

The Digestive System

The digestive process begins in our mouths with the aid of our teeth, tongue, and saliva. Ask your scientist about the Ritz cracker experiments. We learned how long food remains in the stomach and how the small intestine is the workhorse of the digestive tract. Students were shocked to see that the small intestine is 21 feet long while the large intestine is 9 feet long. I imagine you heard about the oatmeal / stocking experiment! Students put oatmeal in the top of a leg of ladies' stockings and squeezed it down the leg towards the toe. This exemplified how the large intestine removes the excess water from the chyme. Ask your student about this!

The Circulatory System

The heart, blood vessels, and blood make up our circulatory system. We learned (and laughed) at Bill Nye's video about the circulatory system. Ask your student why we squeezed a tennis ball 70 times in a minute? We are learning about how the heart pumps the blood, what is carried in the blood, and how the blood vessels are a massive transportation system.  Ask your student about the blood we made in class with yellow food coloring for plasma, Cheerios for red blood cells, marshmallows for white blood cells, and  spiky balls for platelets. To better understand the complexities of the heart, we will be thinking about it as "the heart house." Please see the Children's Heart Institute website for more information about this.

 

http://childrensheartinstitute.org/educate/heartwrk/hearthse.htm



Fraction Cards and Decimal Squares

Improper fractions, mixed numbers, reduced terms, and denominators....oh my! We are beginning our unit on fractions and decimals. 

Here are the big topics that we will focus on at the beginning of our unit:

• Finding fractional parts of a whole
• Adding and subtracting fractions
• Comparing and ordering fractions
• Understanding proper and improper fractions
• Understanding mixed numbers
• Reducing fractions to lowest terms

Please take time to read the following letters that contain more important information about the work we are doing in this unit.

Family Letter About Mathematics

Related Activities to Try at Home

Dates for Biography Speeches

Friday, February 21

Emily

Tuesday, February 25

Kane, Sarah Chason, Josie, Andy, Charlie, Andrew

Wednesday, February 26

Sally, Alexandra, Tate, Sophie, Emma, Kate

Thursday, February 27

Alena, Lillie, Grace, Campbell, Taylor

Friday, February 28

Brendan, Grant, Graham, Lucia, Grayson, Jack