Dear 4th Grade Families,
No, they aren’t rats! They are terrific 4th-grade students! We have loved getting to know your students even more this week! They are becoming more comfortable with 4th-grade routines and expectations, which also allows for their fun-loving personalities to shine.
Important Dates:
- Monday, September 1st – Labor Day – No School
- Thursday, September 11th – Parent Night (Grades 1st – 8th Grade)
- Middle School 5:00 – 6:00
- Elementary 6:30 – 7:30
- September 22 – October 3 – Parent/Teacher Partnership Meetings
- Tuesday, September 23 – Preschool – 1st – School Pictures
- Wednesday, September 24 – 2nd – 5th – School Pictures
ELA:
- Students are reviewing cursive to start the year. Cursive is proven to show improvements in fine motor skills, spelling, and even memory! They are also working on practicing their signatures on all of their papers. Don’t be shy and ask for their new “autograph” every once in a while!
- 4th Grade Rats is a fan favorite with this group. They are diving deeper into their summer reading by learning about character traits for two of the main characters, Suds and Joey.
- Their ELA books are being created to house all important information such as reminders for figurative language, proper sentence structure, and more! This book will become a wealth of information for them as 4th Grade progresses.
Math:
- We started our place-value unit with counting, using groups of tens and one-hundreds to make counting large numbers easier.
- We worked hands-on with Unifix cubes, to understand why grouping numbers helps with counting and all math operations.
- We reviewed adding numbers in the hundreds place using regrouping.
- The students enjoyed the challenge of counting a huge pile of playing cards. Ask your child how they organized this activity to find out how many cards there were.
- Next week, we will continue place-value using numbers in the thousands and millions.
- Mrs. Bishop joins our class every Monday and Wednesday. She will work with students in small focus groups.
Deep Dive (Early American History):
- Picking up right where they left off in 3rd grade, we are studying the 13 original American colonies. Students will learn these by regions of New England or Northern, Middle, and Southern colonies.
Character Education:
- This week, students started to learn about mindfulness. At its core, mindfulness means paying attention and is very connected to social and emotional learning and academic success.
- It’s been shown to improve academic outcomes and help with many social-emotional issues.
- Hopefully, your student tried one of our mindfulness activities with you on Monday!
Computer Science:
- We are still working on getting some of our students logged into their WCDS email. We’ve hit some roadblocks with parental passwords and student passwords, but we hope to have them on their accounts by the end of next week.
- To help us out, please follow the following steps:
- Write out any computer passwords on a sticky note and attach it to the computer or adhere it to their yellow folder.
- Ask your child to log in to their computer with you watching. Some of the students are able to access their school email account and know how to get to Google Classroom.
- As we tried to add their school email account to your child’s personal Gmail account, we were prompted to type in a parent’s email password. Please see the following steps to do this, so that we don’t have to ask you for your personal parental password.
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- If you made a personal Gmail account for your child, please open that email account.
- Click on the top right Google icon with your child’s initial.
- Click on “Add another account”
- It will say that a parental password for the given parent Gmail is needed. Please enter your password.
- The next screen will ask you for the email address you want to add. Please enter your child’s WCDS email in this format: first name last initial (NO spaces) @wcdsedu.com
- Next enter your child’s WCDS email password, in this format: last name(no space)1929
- IF all goes right, this should add their school account to their other Gmail account.
- If none of this makes sense, or none of it works – PLEASE DON’T WORRY! We will work together to make this happen.
- Thank you for your patience and understanding!
Reminders
- Please have your child show you their agenda page every day after school. This page shows what homework is due, what materials are needed, and any other important information.
- Part of your child’s homework is coming to school with a fully charged computer. Please help them establish a good routine with plugging their device in every night and packing it in the morning.
- As the cooler fall temperatures hit us in the morning, the students start shedding their jackets, sweaters, or sweatshirts as the day warms up. Please make sure all clothing is labeled with your child’s name.
