Reading

Spelling

English:

Religion:

Reminders:

Please bring 3- 5 items that will fit in the brown paper bag that I gave to you which will help us to get to know you a little better. This activity will also help us learn about making inferences.

Monday - Music

Tuesday - Library

Wednesday - Media

Thursday - Art

Friday - PE

RELIGION

The fourth grade program of the Christ Our Life series, God Guides Us, is divided into five units with an emphasis on the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. The Christ Our Life series has an online resource on the Loyola Press website. To visit this website click here.  There are interactive reviews and study guides for each chapter which should be used to help your child prepare for chapter quizzes. There are also many interesting articles and links for you and your family to explore on this website. Your child has the opportunity to earn one extra point on their chapter quizzes by completing the online review and emailing me upon completion. However, the maximum grade can only be 100%.  Please help your child enter my correct email address, or I will not receive their email, and therefore will not award the extra point. 

READING

The majority of our in-class Reading will come from the Wonders  Reading series.  To visit this website click here. Students will have workbooks which we will complete together in class during our discussions of the Reading selections.  Additionally, we have  online components available to us which students will access for various assignments. There will be an open-book comprehension  assessment given for each selection, as well as an assessment of the Reading skills  and strategies taught within each selection. 

In addition to using the Wonders anthology, students will also be doing quite a bit of independent reading - not only in the classroom, but ideally they should read for a minimum of 20 minutes every day as well.  We will use the Accelerated Reader (AR) Program where students will be assigned a goal based on their independent reading level.  Their total AR score (an average of their total comprehension and the percentage of their goal reached) will count as one test grade in Reading each trimester.

VOCABULARY

There will be 8 assigned vocabulary words to coincide with each Reading selection in Wonders.  Your child will have the opportunity to practice vocabulary by completing  homework assignments on the Wonders site. Their knowledge of the assigned words will be assessed at the same time as the Reading comprehension assessment which is approximately every other week.

SPELLING

Spelling lists for each unit in our anthology will be sent home for students to study as needed. Each week, there will be 10 words for students to know. Students will have to write the words 2x each for homework. This will be due on Wednesdays which are the test days. 

WRITTEN EXPRESSION

A portion of your child's written expression grade will be a written response to the various story selections in our anthology,  We will focus on writing paragraphs with a good topic sentence (using words from the question in our answer), strong supporting details (citing examples from the story), and a wrap up (or concluding sentence).  We will also work on several larger writing pieces throughout the year focusing on narratives, expository pieces, and opinion essays.  To help us achieve our goals in writing, we will use the 6+1 Traits of Writing model to look at the qualities (or traits) of good writing.  This model provides a vocabulary for us to discuss what makes writing good and will help us improve our own writing.  As a school wide initiative, your child has will focus on particular traits (Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions) within each grade level.  For a concise definition of each of the traits, please refer to this website.

ENGLISH

English will be taught using a traditional approach as we follow the units in the Houghton Mifflin textbook. Generally I will introduce a new lesson every other day, and children will be assigned a workbook page that evening which we will review and check the following day.   English homework should not take more than approximately 5 minutes to complete, and late assignments will lose one point per day.