Merry Christmas!

I hope that you are all having a Merry Christmas! Enjoy your time with your loved ones! We saw a little snow in New Jersey last night!

Polar Express Day

Merry Christmas!

Resources

As you all (probably) know, I was at home sick on Friday.  (Word travels fast by 4th grade lips!  haha!)  I am feeling much better and I am ready to be back tomorrow.  I am ready to greet each student with a smile and a hug, and let them know that they are safe and welcomed at school.  I wanted to take the time to post several resources that deal with speaking to your children about the events in Sandy Hook on Friday.  

Fred Rogers Company

PBS-Through Your Child's Eyes

Restoring a sense of safety

Resources from the NY Times

Reminders:

-Tuesday, Dec 18th-Pajama Day/Polar Express Day

-Wednesday, Dec 19-Christmas Party/11:30 Dismissal (busses will run)

Book update

4th grade book count is up to 828!

Reminder

Just a quick reminder, I will be out of the classroom until Friday afternoon.

Update

As of this post, we are almost at 800 finished books in room D-107!!  I'm so proud of my fourth graders!
Just a reminder that reading logs should be completed nightly.  Your child needs to read for 20 minutes a night and record at least 3-5 sentences in the comment/connection/question section.

I will not be in school Wednesday-Friday this week.  I'm going to be learning new things to incorporate in our classroom!  I can't wait to come back and share what I've learned.

We will be using Edmodo and KidBlog in our classroom weekly, so students need to be practicing their typing skills using sites from the Student Resources section of the Oak Grove website.

A letter will be going home on Monday for Ms. Sheehan's homeroom.  It will outline our holiday party plans and other events happening in the month of December.

I want to take a moment to thank all of you who have sent in supplies over the past couple of weeks, I truly appreciate it!!  Thank you for all of your support.

Crazy day at school today!! More pictures to come this afternoon!

Don't forget tomorrow is crazy about math day! We get to dress crazy!!

Free books and bloggers!

4th grade students are now published bloggers!  Look for pictures to come later.  :)

Here is a great website to read children's books online, for free!!

http://www.wegivebooks.org

Team C webquest

Team C explored The Met through a webquest today!

Team C WebQuest link:
Click here

Peek into our room!

4th grade is keeping us busy!  We've been able to increase the school book count quite a bit this week!
Team A has been able to buddy up with Mrs. Parks' first grade class to help them become better readers!  We loved meeting our reading buddies and look forward to reading with them once a month!
Here's a glimpse into life in D-107!

4th grade movie stars!

A large part of the new Common Core is using evidence from a text to support a claim or answer.  We have been practicing that in our writing.  In order to help us get a better understanding of what evidence is, we created movies!

Click For:
Team A

Click for:
Team B

Click for:
Team C

Webcast with a star!

We are currently doing a webcast with Taylor Swift about the importance of reading. She's sharing with us how reading helped her become a better songwriter!!

Congrats to the 4th graders for doing an awesome job with today's math CRA testing!  Tomorrow we will be taking our practice writing assessment.  We are working hard on developing our writing skills, so I know that my students will do a great job!
We have been using edmodo this week, it's a great new way to incorporate technology into our classroom.  I posted a question on Monday morning, students have until Friday afternoon to answer.

Help!

WANTED

Post-it notes (or sticky notes of any variety!)

We will be starting an activity with nonfiction text and we will be in serious need of post-it notes (or sticky notes of any variety).  If you have any regular sized sticky notes that can be sent in with your students, we would appreciate it!

Thank you!!!

What could we be up to? Stay tuned to see!!

Edmodo

As your children may have mentioned, technology plays a large role in room D-109.  :)  I'm always looking for new technology to incorporate into our reading lessons!
We are going to begin using a site called Edmodo.  It is set up similar to other social networking sites, but this is for educational purposes.  Your students have (or will be doing so tomorrow) set up an account.  In order to set up an account, a "secret code" was given to them.  This code needed to be used for the students to join the site.  This is a safe and secure site, where only people added to our group can see messages displayed.  Edmodo gives your children the opportunity to respond to questions and polls online, through the class I have created.  I will be posting a question on Mondays that will need to be answered by Friday afternoon.  Your children can access the site through internet at home, as well as at school.  There is also an Apple Edmodo app, which I put on my phone this afternoon.  Students will also be able to post during our short homework period, if internet access is not available at home.
http://www.edmodo.com

Writing with evidence

In Reading we have been working on responding to nonfiction texts. We are learning how important it is to be "text detectives" and show our evidence from the text.