Welcome to Fourth Grade!
We are a community of learners and friends, growing and working together.
We are a community of learners and friends, growing and working together.
January 6, 2020
Dear Fourth Grade Families,
We are super excited to welcome Eli back to our class! It feels like we are complete again! We have 14 students again, a nice even number, and we’re all back together just in time for lots of new learning!!
We finished our Life Science unit on Friday with some fun experiments about how information moves in and out of our brains! Ask your child about sensory and movement nerves, and see what you can learn! Also, our animal presentations are located on our class webpage on the Science tab. The direct link is https://rockcesfourth.weebly.com/science.html but you can navigate there by going to our school website, www.ceshome.org, click on Class Pages, and choose Mrs. Kane - 4. Once you get to our class page, click on the Science page, and you will see the long list of videos, one for each student! One of my goals for the new year is to keep our webpage more up-to-date with photos and presentations there, so I would love it if you would bookmark our site and check back often. If I know you’re looking, I’ll be sure to update!
This is the week of mid-year assessments. We will be taking our Math and Reading MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) assessments along with an opinion writing pre-assessment. All of these assessments will take place in the morning over the course of this week. Thank you in advance for helping your child be ready to do his or her best!
We will also begin a fun Math unit on Measurement and Data this week. We will be collecting data and learning about representing that data in different ways, including line plots and bar graphs. This is a quick unit, but it is always exciting to see what kind of data we can collect and present! In Science, our new unit focuses on Earth Science. We will be learning about slow and fast changes to the Earth, and this week we will research the topics of volcanoes, root and ice wedging, and landslides!
Have a wonderful week!
Kate Kane
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January 2, 2020
Dear Fourth Grade Families,
Welcome back to school and to 2020! I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful holiday season, filled with family, friends, and whatever brings you joy! I always love seeing the fourth graders after the holiday break--they seem to have grown more than I think they should have in two short weeks, and they are eager to get settled back into the routine and into learning! So...here we go!
We are going to use the two brief days this week to finish up Math and Science units that we were working our way through in December. Then, beginning next week, we will begin new units across the board: in our Literacy Block, we will focus on opinion/persuasive writing; in Math, we will begin a unit on measurement and data; in Science, we will begin our Earth Science unit; and in Social Studies, we will continue our meandering study of Vermont’s history and people. Our next two read-aloud books are Cave of Falling Water, which tells the story of a certain Vermont cave through the eyes of a Native American girl, a Colonial girl, and a modern-day girl; and Ann Story: Vermont’s Heroine of Independence, a biography of the woman called the “Mother of the Green Mountain Boys.”
On the day before the holiday vacation, we filled up our kindness jar with marbles! We will now send a photo of our marble jar to the publishers of the book Wonder, and we may win $500 to donate to a charity of our choice. We will wait to see if we win before we decide on a charity, but regardless, every marble in the jar represents an act of kindness done by someone in our class! That’s a lot of marbles, and that’s a lot of kindness!!
I hope your new year is off to a fabulous start! Have a wonderful week!
Kate Kane
