Did You Know…? The official city bird of Madison, Wisconsin is the plastic pink flamingo.

Good evening,

Today the Grade 4 students and I worked in our Math Journals to continue to practice constructing our own bar graphs. Afterwards we discussed our unit thus far. We are actually almost finished this unit. Students will have 1-2 more lessons next week before we begin chapter review. We will announce their unit test next week, but it will be either Friday, September 25th, or Monday, September 28th, depending on how our review is going. This Monday, students will be bringing home their “Data Sheet” for the unit, which outlines how they have been doing on quizzes and other assessments. Parents are asked to sign this sheet so that I can verify who has seen it and who hasn’t. Looking for extra Math practice? Students all have a Mathletics account which they are welcome to use at any time. The usernames and passwords are the same as last years, however, if your student has forgotten they are the same usernames and passwords as their Tynker accounts. All students have their Tynker usernames and passwords in the front of the student agenda. You can also visit the Math page (see side links). There I have posted permanent copies of the Mathletics workbooks for this unit. Parents are welcome to print and use these workbooks at home with their students. I’ve also included the link below:

Grade 4 – Chance and Data – Student Workbook

Grade 5 – Chance and Probability – Student Workbook

Grade 5 – Data Representation – Student Workbook

In Language Arts today, students spent time learning about our first grammar topic – nouns. Many students remembered from previous years that nouns are generally people, places, and things. However, this year we have expanded upon that. We will be looking at proper, concrete, abstract, singular and abstract nouns. A proper noun is a SPECIFIC person, place, or thing (eg. Charlie, Washington, Brett Drive, etc.), and as a result begins with a capital letter. A concrete noun is something that you can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch (eg. dog, pizza, book), while an abstract noun is something that you CAN’T see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Abstract nouns are generally feelings or ideas (eg. happiness, love, etc.). Finally a singular noun is one person, place, or thing (eg. cow), while a plural noun is more than one person, place, or thing (eg. cows). Students added a foldable on nouns to their Interactive Notebooks, and then we read a book called “The Noun Hound.”

In Social today students finished looking at Scale. We used a map of Egypt and a scale to measure the distance between different locations. Then we moved on to our next two map features: latitude and longitude. In order to begin our study, we watched the following videos:

Then to practice using cardinal and intermediate directions to give directions on a grid we played an oldie but a goody… Battleship. We’ll be playing again next week to get some more practice. Want to play at home? You can click on the link to print the template. You could also further explore latitude and longitude with this online game:

Latitude and Longitude Battleship

KidsGeo Online Game – http://www.kidsgeo.com/geography-games/latitude-longitude-map-game.php

Today we sent home the Terry Fox Donations forms. Students are not required to make a donation. Our school walk will be on September 25th. An incentive to donate is this – if we raise $5000 as a school, we get to shave Mr. Dykstra’s head!

Agenda:

Read 20 minutes

Math: unfinished work (Grade 5)

Terry Fox Walk/Donations – September 25th

Book Orders – Sept. 25th