Mrs. Alabakoff's 4th/5th GradeDearborn Public Schools

Sep 4th Welcome to Fourth Grade

Welcome Back to School!   I am very excited to get to know all the students and families.  I am glad that many people have subscribed to the blog to receive regular updates.  I will generally post each week and also post reminders for upcoming events!

This week has started out very hot, so we are doing our best to get through it!  The students have been such troopers!  I am so proud of them and I am already seeing great behavior.

Please make sure you check the planner and sign it nightly.  It is a great communication tool.  You may write me notes or ask questions and I will check it each afternoon.  I will also stamp or initial it as well.

This week we are learning:

Spelling–Our focus this week is short vowels.  The students write the words in their planner every Monday and they will have a test on Friday.  They will have 10 words with the spelling pattern, along with 4 content words and a word of the week.  The word of the week is a new vocabulary word and students will need to know the meaning as well as the spelling for the test.  This is a great way for them to “grow” their vocabulary.  Students love to learn these new challenging words.

Writer’s Workshop–We are working a short descriptive piece for writing.  It will give me an opportunity to get to know the students as writers.  We are working on identifying and adding descriptive language to our piece of writing.

Daily 5/CAFE–The students have retained a lot of the Daily 5 from last year!  So far, we have reviewed Read to Self and practiced our Stamina, talked about choosing books with the I PICK and also practice the strategy of compare and contrast.  We did text to text connections with a partner.    It is always helpful if you ask your child about the things they are learning in Daily 5/CAFE and of course your child should spend time reading each night.

We will also begin our NWEA Reading testing this week.

Math–In the next couple weeks, you will become more familiar with our new Math—Eureka Math.  Students will generally have a bit of homework in Math.  This week we are working on comparisons of multiplication with powers of 10.

Social Studies–We will begin Social Studies with the five themes of geography.  We will focus on maps and globes and identifying continents, hemispheres and learn about absolute and relative location.

Looking forward  to a great year!

Stay Cool!

 

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