Update Feb 15

Parents,

All students and parents were met over Thursday and Friday.  Conferences are a great time to touch base and make sure we are all on the same page and working together. A couple new plans are in place and I am excited for the second half of the year.

I received a lot of valuable feedback about homework. You will notice tomorrow's homework sheet comes two sided. Therefore, you and your family can choose to do 40-60 minutes of homework each night or turn it all in on Monday. I will inform students of this change but remind them that this homework agreement needs to be between you and your child. This does mean that homework will be checked on Monday not everyday. I will give reminders to turn in homework but will not be calling out names until Monday.

We are getting ready for the International Fair (perhaps more accurately our "Water Fair") on April 14th. Please look to next week's update to have information from the whole 4th grade team, as well as, a planning sheet for the students.

Inquiry/ Water Project:
We have 2 presentations this week. One is from the US Winterim trip group going to Laos. Tom Handel stated his group plans to start with a brief introduction about the upcoming trip and the trip pursuits and goals. This will include looking at a map of Laos, where we are going, and a geographic look at the Mekong River. I will be steering the conversation from general topics on Laos (the people, the culture, the way of life) to the river issues in Laos that we have heard about, read about and will soon have an opportunity to see first hand.
Our second presentation is a parent presentation by Eric Gabrielson who will share his work with water issues with the students.
We hope to form some action around our concerns surrounding Nestle and their bottling plans in the gorge. We have discussed writing letters to Gov. Brown, collecting signatures, telling more people, posters, and doing some research on Nestle's company.
During all this, we are also starting to get into possible water issue topic brainstorming and questioning.

Reading:
It is time for us to start to really dive into nonfiction reading and research strategies. We will read a couple more short articles surrounding water issues but will also read an article on passion project s around the USA to make connections for our own work. Specifically this week, we are looking to highlight and analyze aspects of our reading that surprise us. How to highlight these areas, capture thoughts/quotes, and record them for future use.

Writing:
I will continue to work with small groups on topic sentences and strengthening our points of view with direct quotes and evidence from text. However, this will be our last week to finish our literary essay. We will do another essay before the end of the year, hopefully even two more!

Math:
We will continue our work with Mr. Arensberg. This project is over an hour of math exploration, problem solving and multiplication strategy each day, please see previous blog entry for more details.
I am pushing Khan Academy for homework and practice. This online resource is a smart program that can really target specific skills. I have started making recommendations based on their practice thus far and will continue to monitor and request skills that need additional review.

Passion Projects:
Passion projects are student centered learning time. Therefore, students will be meeting as a group to help draft a specific rubric that will detail project requirements. I will post this document on the blog by the end of the week. We will also have an additional passion project work time on Friday as is our schedule, during this time, I will check in with each individual and group project. We hope to have a individualistic and specific plan for parents to review and sign next week.

As always, I encourage you to always email with questions, feedback, etc.