Fourth Grade Newsletter October 2009

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P.S. 238

Greetings Parents Welcome to the fourth grade! I am so privileged and excited to be working with your children this school year. We have many exciting things planned and a lot of work to do! Please be sure that your child is completing all of his/her homework assignments carefully and with great effort. In addition, each night the children are required to read for at least 20 minutes and to complete their reading log. Please monitor this reading time and be sure that your child is engaged in the reading he/she is doing. With your help at home, each child can have a successful school year and that is our main goal!

Mrs. Ratner

This Month’s Events

The children have been participating in a special ballroom dance program since the middle of September and have been having great success with that. We are also pleased to announce that our ESL program is up and running. Mrs. Nadel looks forward to working with some of your children this school year.

Science and Social Studies

This year Ms. Goldberg will be our science teacher. Our first unit in Science focuses on animals and plants in their environment. In September, we learned how living things, or organisms, get classified and how they get their energy. This month students will be learning about animal behaviors, animal needs and ecosystems. This year in Science, students will be exposed to a lot of new vocabulary. They are creating their own flashcards that will help them understand these new words. Students take their flashcards home to study. Please assist them in practicing these new vocabulary words. In Social Studies, we will be learning about the Native Americans of New York State. We will discuss how they lived, the resources they used, traditions and how they were governed. Throughout the year students will be developing social studies vocabulary flashcards. They will be using these cards to reinforce vocabulary that will be on their 5th grade State-Wide Social Studies Examination.

The Anne Sullivan School 1633 East 8th Street Brooklyn, NY 11223 October 2009 Volume 1, Issue 1

Reader’s Workshop

I have spent the first month of school assessing your child’s reading level on a one-to-one basis. In doing so, we are learning about your child’s strengths and weaknesses. This will allow us to group the children accordingly and provide them with the appropriate instruction. We will be working with different groups, teaching them strategies and skills to increase their comprehension and fluency. These are life- long lessons and hopefully will make your children stronger in literacy as they go on to later grades.

Writer’s Workshop

For our first writing piece, we will be focusing on a narrative account, which is simply a story. We have decided to teach the children how to write their very own fables. I will be using standard-based lessons to teach them the elements of a fable and will be using the writing process to complete this task. In the first month of school, we set up the rituals and routines that we expect to be followed during our writer’s workshop. One key component of this is for your child to work independently and stay focused on their writing. It is hard work and we look forward to seeing the published pieces.

Everyday Mathematics For the month of October, we will be completing Units 2 and 3 in our Everyday Math program. We will cover addition and subtraction of multi-digit numbers, displaying data on a bar graph, multiplication and division facts, and working with number sentences. A great deal of what we will be teaching was taught to the children in previous years. Please be sure to assist your child, if necessary, and encourage him/her to memorize the multiplication and division facts. It will only help your children to be successful now and in the future.