Reminder: Curriculum Night TOMORROW!

Remember, curriculum night is tomorrow evening!  At 6:00pm, Miss Kaela Crystal is holding a meeting for families interested in learning about the strings program.  (Anyone who plans of having their fourth grader participate in the string orchestra is STRONGLY encouraged to attend.)  At 6:30pm, you’re invited to join me here in room 209 to learn all about fourth grade.  It’s sure to be an amazing evening! 😉  Hope to see you here!

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss

One Week In!

Hello, families!  It’s hard to believe that it was only a week ago that we first came together to start the school year.  We’ve been working on so many different activities, learning classroom routines and expectations, and getting to know one another.  I’ve enjoyed the past week, and I hope your fourth grader has too!  Here are a few highlights:

• On the first day, we came together as a school to ring the school bell and to ring in a new year!  We also did some getting to know you activities, including beginning the “Spiral Me” posters, which we’ll HOPEFULLY have ready to share tomorrow night at curriculum night!  (Remember!  See you at 6:30pm!)
• Our second day of school was filled with quite a bit of procedural discussions.  How does morning arrival work?  What are our dismissal routines?  What should a safe and fun recess look like, sound like, and feel like?  These were all topics on Tuesday.  It’s not glamorous, but it does help us ALL down the road by making sure that expectations are clear and understood by all.  We also opened up the class library by discussing the routines (Yes, more routines!) for shopping for, borrowing, and returning books.
• Friday opened with a terrific discussion about what fairness means in our class.  Students shared their own ideas, and we settled on our class definition.  (You can see it tomorrow at at curriculum night!  6:30pm!)  We also met with Mr. G to discuss expectations for town meetings.  But a fun highlight was getting to work in groups to design some REALLY COOL structures out of marshmallows and toothpicks!  I was amazed both my the creativity as well as the collaboration I saw.
• Yesterday, we started working on our social contract (more on this another time) and we continued working on our Spiral Me projects.  We met again as a grade to discuss lunchroom expectations and to touch base on some school safety routines.
• Today was, I feel, the first day in which we started some normal routines.  We launched math with a great conversation about how we FEEL about math.  It’s something students tend to love or loathe, and we opened with me sharing my story as a math student.  I really struggled with math growing up, and I felt as if I wasn’t a “math person”.  But we talked a lot about how wrong I was, how much I grew to enjoy math (though not until college, sadly), and how recent scientific research has disproven the idea of some people being more mathematically inclined.  Our conversation surrounded the ideas within this video:
  
  Our math lesson continued with an introduction to place value.  Some students felt more comfortable with the concepts than others, and that’s TOTALLY FINE.  It’s day one of math, after all!  As adults, we don’t all master a new concept at the same rate, so we surely can’t expect our kids to either.  We’ll keep working together, and at curriculum night tomorrow (6:30!) I’ll share more information about how you can help your fourth grader at home.

Did I mention that we have curriculum night tomorrow at 6:30?  🙂  I’d love to meet you!  Remember, Miss Crystal is holding a meeting for families interested in the strings program tomorrow at 6pm.

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss