Daily Archives: October 24, 2024

We were hit with another short week this week and boy, did it ever fly by!

We continued on our number sense journey this week by doing some work with addition to find out just how much you already know. What is great is that we found out that all of you can add up to three by three digit numbers with and without regrouping!  As we discussed, if you can do that, you can do any large digit addition. Knowing that, it is important for you to “brush up” on your speed with addition as you are now in the intermediate grades. If you are still using your fingers, it might be time to see if you can do some practice work on your own to improve your speed. Next up, we will challenge our addition skills with some problem solving using the mental math strategies we explored earlier this month.  Next week, we will be doing some similar practice with subtraction to see how your skills are in that area. Can you subtract with borrowing? Can you subtract three by three digit equations? Once we see where we are at, we will also challenge those skills with problem solving questions.

On Thursday, we had the opportunity to work with a partner on our GOW to prepare for an assessment next week.  The GOW “Buddy Study” was focused around Pets and the data was already given to us.  With your partner you  discussed how to represent that data in fractions and then how to graph it using a pictograph and a bar graph.  As always, there was a “Write On” component as well.  This was also done in partnership so that you could discuss the best Topic sentence as well as five more informative and interesting sentences about pets in YOUR life.  Your GOW assessment will be on MONDAY ( 28th), so take home your buddy study to practice!

This week we also worked on our School Wide Write samples and the Literacy FSA (grade 4’s). For all students, we used the in class time discuss and then to answer a question about either friendship or nature. All students writing the FSA will have their writing samples taken from whatever they wrote in the personal response portion of the FSA assessment. Everyone else in the class, during the FSA time, chose a question to respond to similar to the question from the FSA, and that writing will be their sample used in the School Wide Write assessments. What is a School Wide Write assessment? That is a piece of writing that teachers will collect in all of the classes in the school. On the November 22 Professional Day, teachers will meet with all their grade group teachers to mark all the samples as a team. Doing this makes sure that all the 4/5 teachers for example, have the same expectations of all the students in those grades. This way, no matter what teacher you have, you will know we all have the same expectations of students in grades 4 and 5. Next week, we will finish our online Literacy FSA and move onto the Math sections.

A lot of you were able to have fun and explore Typing.com during the online FSA. While we had access to our computers, many of you played games and completed practice lessons using that website. It was amazing to see how many of you are developing really great typing habits that will definitely help you as you move up in grades. Being able to type, with two hands on the keyboard instead of ‘pecking’ is an important skill. Please take some time at home to show your parents the website and show them what you can do! For many of you, printing is not easy so, using a computer to process your writing is a great choice! It can be quite quick and easy once you get the hang of it.

Your Haunted Houses are coming along very well. Time is ticking as Halloween is almost upon us! We had a couple of building sessions this week and with only ONE more guaranteed building session next week, we really have to use our time wisely!  Monday will be our last day to do major work unless Mrs. Gil is able to slot in a little more time on Tuesday or Wednesday for final touches.

Halloween is on Thursday!  You may come to school dressed in costume as long as it follows these conditions:

1. Culture is not a costume. So please do not dress up as a person from another country.
2. Weapons are NOT allowed.  If swords, guns, or other weapons are part of your costume, please keep those for trick-or-treating in the evening and don’t bring them to school.
3. .If you are wearing a mask, make sure you can SEE CLEARLY with it on.

4. If you are dressing up as something scary or gory, please keep that for the evening and choose something else for school. We don’t want our younger school mates getting terrified and having nightmares.  Let’s keep our costumes “G” rated and as friendly as possible.

One final note about Halloween:  Many of you donated some Megabucks on Thursday toward our party.  Our goal was to reach at least 40 MB to earn one hour of party time up to a max of 90 minutes which would cost 60 MB.  With your generous donations, it gives us great pleasure to announce that the party is ON!! You donated a total of 71 Megabucks toward it, so that will give you the full afternoon on Halloween to enjoy some free time to play games. We’ll discuss this in more detail on Monday, but well done Division 7!

Your blog response for the weekend is this:  

Why is “culture NOT a costume”?  Why would dressing up as a person from another country/cultural group be inappropriate? 

Have a great LONG weekend Division 7!  See you again on Monday!

Mrs. Gil and Mrs. Davis