Grade 4A�s News
Teachers: Mrs. Muto-Pomakis and Mme. Campeau
Thank you to the many parents keeping the communication flowing in the classroom by sending along letters in agendas or calling and leaving messages at the school. I will try to keep the communication at as high a level as possible and hope that you will too. I�d like to provide you with my e-mail address (which I check daily) and give you the opportunity to send me a message whenever you can about your child and how things are going with homework. For homework I have spoken to the students about my expectation � at grade four I feel that the students should be doing about 40 minutes of homework per night � and since the students are studying both in French and English, each language should be given 20 minutes of dedicated time. If your child is doing more than 20 minutes per night (for English) please let me know. � [email protected]
In French, we are currently viewing the plural of different nouns and we are learning verbs with endings in IR. We are also continuing to practice cursive writing in our daily activities. Next DICT�ES will be on February 6th and on February 22nd.
In Social Studies, we have currently started the unit on medieval times. We will discuss the ways of living during this period of time and we will be eventually building a model of a castle.
In Science, we will be starting a small unit on pulleys and gears, which we will integrate into the building of the castle.As for music, we have just finished an Art Smart project on drumming, which ended with a great performance presented at Mrs. McLaurin�s retirement ceremony. Great work!
Sincerly, Mme. Campeau
In Math, we are starting a unit on geometry. We will be focusing specifically on 2-D shapes. Throughout this time, you and your child can explore geometric ideas together through activities such as the following:�
- You and your child might enjoy using the concept of similarity to enlarge drawings of cartoon charaters. Draw a grid over the image, and then, on a piece of paper, draw the same grid, but with larger squares. Copy the shapes in the grid squares on the original onto the squares of the larger grid.� - You and your child might play a simple card game to help your child identify shapes by name, as follows: make 20 cards showing names or drawings of quadrilaterals, 4 each of parallelogram, rhombus, trapezoid, square, and rectangle. Shuffle the cards. Then each player draws 4 cards. On a turn, a player can discard 1 card and pick 1 new card. The first player with 4 cards in one category (all are trapezoids, or parallelograms, and so on) wins.
You may also want to visit the Nelson Web site at www.mathk8nelson.com for more suggestions to help your child learn mathematics and for books that relate children�s literature to 2-D geometry.
In Language Arts we have finally finished our alphabet books and we are into our last stages for our class newspaper. We will be doing a bit of drama this month in conjunction with parts of speech and do a folder book report. I am also hoping to put up a web page for the students and parents to go to when students forget agendas and for other helpful tips for studying. I�ll send home this information as soon as it happens! Have a great February!
Mrs. Muto-Pomakis