December Writing Workshop

Theme Essay Unit

The fourth grade students have been learning a lot about various big life topics and experiences that people will encounter throughout their lives. Some Big Life Topics that we are noticing pop up in our independent reading books and our read aloud books are:

Friendship

Fitting In

Families

Accepting Others

Accepting Yourself

Death

Loss

Siblings

Peer Pressure

In this writing unit, the students are working on noticing themes and or messages that can be interpreted about the Big Life Topics stated above. The theme essay will then convey the various themes they learned from the books that they read. In the essay, students will have to state the theme and use three pieces of text evidence to support their theme. 

December Events

December is an exciting month filled with lots of holiday joy! Please check out the special events our fourth grade is participating in this month.

December 16th @ 12:45PM- Nutrition and Movement Dress Rehearsal

December 17th @ 10AM- Nutrition and Movement Performance.  The entire Fourth Grade will be doing a performance about healthy eating and the importance of exercise.  Come join us and celebrate what we have learned!

**All students performing must wear all black, black pants (leggings, sweatpants, no jeans) and a black t-shirt for BOTH the dress rehearsal and performance.**

December 18th @ 8:40AM- Parents as Reading Partners- Come to school and read with your family.

December 23rd- Silly Day- Students are encouraged to wear pajamas with your favorite bedtime book!

December 24rd- Winter Recess Begins

November / December Reading

November/December Reading Unit:

Identifying Themes

The goal of this unit is to help the students understand that comprehending books is not just about understanding the plot of the story, instead, comprehending books means thinking about the ideas within books.  We want to help kids become more thoughtful as they read, understanding tha books are about ideas.  We want readers to develop the habit of asking themselves:

• What is this story really about?
• What themes or messages are buried in the text?
• What evidence to I have to support my thinking?
• What lesson can I learn about life after reading this story?

To help the students throughout this process, they will be introduced to Big Life Topics.  BLTs are the general topics that show up in books.  Once we have identified the BLTs, we then begin the work of narrowing down themes.

Below you will see examples of the Big Life Topics we will be covering in class, and some of the possible themes that can be developed from these BLTs.

In order to develop our skills in developing themes, we will be reading a number of short stories together and having conversations geared towards identifying BLTs as well as the themes that show up across multiple texts.  Some of the texts we will be reading throughout this unit are:

November Math

November Math

This month, we will begin our unit of study in multiplication and division.  Students will build upon their knowledge of place value that they learned throughout the first unit, as well as use visual representations to solve multiplication and division problems with multi-digit numbers.  As a key area of focus for fourth grade, this module works to develop students ability to reason about the methods and models chosen to solve problems with multi-digit factors and dividends.  

Students will begin by investigating formulas for area and perimeter.  They will then move on to using number discs and the place value chart to multiply single digit numbers by multiples of 10, 100 and 1,000.  Later, they will be able to multiply two digit multiples of ten by each other.  The students will be exposed to further practice with place value charts and area models.  See below for an example of each:

Solving a multiplication problem using a place value chart:

Solving a multiplication problem using area model:

New or Recently Introduced Vocabulary for this unit:

• Associative property 
• Composite Number
• Distributive property
• Divisor
• Partial Product
• Prime Number
• Remainder

Familiar terms:

• Area
• Bundling
• Compare
• Factors
• Multiple
• Perimeter
• Product
• Quotient