Weekly Update

Dear Families,
It is wonderful to be back in the classroom again! My own children are feeling much better and we all went back on Monday. Thank you so much for all of your support through this illness.
We finished our studies of the Native Americans last week, but you probably have seen your child come home with many folders, booklets and writing samples. We produced a lot of materials during this unit! I posted a new slideshow of our Northwest Native American projects on our blog with the students singing a song from the show. It is great, we think, and we hope you will see it together at home. We also hope you take the time to carefully go through the materials to see all the great learning taking place in our classroom. Your child should also have brought home the assessment rubric and the overall assessment score for this unit. If you did not see it, please contact me.
Our new unit of study will be Ecology. We will study the various climate regions around the world, such as the desert, the rainforest, the arctic, etc. We will focus upon how the animals and plants of these regions survive in their respective habitats. More information will follow. In the meantime, I have added many educational and interactive games to our wiki. The sites are linked under “Ecology.” We will also study physical science in depth in the weeks to come. Currently, we are studying “Force and Motion.” While gaining knowledge within this specific area of science, the students are also expected to apply scientific research principles, such as data collection, analysis, and experimentation. They are encouraged to inquire and predict while conducting hands-on experiments and they are encouraged to draw scientific conclusions based upon evidence gathered in our unit. Next Friday, the students will receive their first Theme Vocabulary List. The Vocabulary List will contain 5 words that your child is expected to write in a sentence that explains the meaning of that word within the context of our unit of study. Students will also be assessed on their usage of correct grammar, usage and mechanics. Fouth graders are already familiar with this as they did this last year. There are two important changes, however. First, the list will come home on Fridays (instead of Mondays). The sentences are due the following Friday (just like our Reading Logs!). This way, students can more easily manage their homework and schedules since they can use time over the weekend, if needed. Second, your child’s words will come home with a text or passage to help your child determine its meaning within the context. This text is an aid in your child’s understanding of the words. It is not a text to be used to copy from. Students must use their own words and show their own understanding. More information will follow next Friday.
Ask your child about our science classes this past week. Ask your child to explain how tin foil, sand paper, carpets and tiles influence motion through friction. I took many pictures this week and I have uploaded them to snapfish. If you were interested in joining our classroom photo sharing group, I have added you as a guest to my Classroom account. You should get an e-mail from snapfish with directions for how to access this group. There is a password for you to enter and this password should have been provided in the e-mail from snapfish. Please let me know if you have any problems accessing our classroom pictures.
Parent-teacher conferences are scheduled for November 23rd and 24th. Both days are half-days for students. I sent out conference confirmation letters a while back. If you did not sign up for a time-slot during the Open House and did not contact me, I provided you with a time-slot. Please return the bottom piece of this weekly letter indicating that you know your time and that you can attend during that time. I will do my best to accommodate everybody’s schedule. Thank you! Please know that if neither of these days work for you, we can meet at an earlier or later date. Thank you. There will be no school between November 25th-27th due to the Thanksgiving Day holiday break.
I will attend a technology conference between December 1-3 so the students will have a substitute teacher for those days when I am out. I hope to learn many new and exciting things that we can do in the classroom to make our instruction more effective while increasing student engagement and learning. We integrate technology in everything we do in our classroom. Currently, the students are learning how to create manageable file structures on their school account for all of their writing folders. We write on the computers daily. Ask your child to explain how we keep track of our narrative, paragraph and letter writing pieces on the computers. We even read on the computer. Ask your child to explain who did our read aloud on Monday in class. (Hint: we pulled it up on the Smartboard for all to see). We also do math on the computer and more recently we started drawing on the computer. Your child started writing his/her letters to our Swedish pen pals this week. They did a great job! Ask your child what we wrote about and the three things we had to include in these letters. Your child will bring these home in the weeks to come so you can share this process with us. In a few weeks, the students will create a project on Vermont, and Hinesburg in particular, that we hope to share with our Swedish friends using some form of technology. More information will follow!
Speaking of technology…the school web-site has changed. If you encounter any problems navigating around it or finding information, please let me know. Our classroom blog and wiki remain the same and have been linked to my webpage. I have added many new gadgets and sites. I do this continually so please visit often.

Have a great weekend!
Regards,
Maria McCormack