I hope you all had a good week and are enjoying the cooler temperatures. Ty served at Mass for the first time on Wednesday and did a wonderful job. Next Wednesday, Jacob will serve at our school Mass for the first time. Below you will find a list of reminders, a recap of our week, and our focus for next week.

1. With the cooler temperatures, students will need to start bringing a jacket or sweatshirt each day.

2. 3rd and 4th Graders have their Faith Formation prayer projects due on Tuesday for Mrs. Fritz. Many students still need to work on these at home this weekend. If you have any questions, please let Mrs. Fritz know.

3. Wednesday and Friday are Pride Day dress days.

4. There is NO SCHOOL on Friday, October 7th. It is the St. James Color Run Day. We hope to see you there!

3rd Grade Math: Our new unit is on representing data in different ways through graphs. The students focused on reading, using, and creating tally tables, frequency tables, and picture graphs this week. One project they completed had them create a survey question to gather data. They then created their own picture graphs by on that data and developed questions about their graphs for other students to answer. We ended the week with a fun Kahoot game based on picture graphs. One important lesson the class learned was to ALWAYS read the key on the graph first.

4th Grade Math: Our new unit is on multiplication. We began the week by making multiplication comparisons (ex: 42 is 6 times as many as 7) and modeling them. That led into our multi-day study of solving multiplication comparison problems. Here is an example problem the class learned how to solve:

Ben has 5 times as many football cards as he has baseball cards. If he has 36 cards altogether, how many of them are football cards?

This is more difficult skill to master. The students worked very hard this week on modeling and solving those problems. We ended the week by learning how to multiply by tens, hundreds, and thousands (ex: 5 x 8,000 = 40,000). 

Reading: We spent the week learning how to compare and contrast characters within stories. Students used what they learned the past few weeks about analyzing characters to be able to explain how the characters had similar or different problems, feelings, and traits.

Phonics/Spelling: The students continued to work on their consonant, vowel, and syllable patterns. There were no assessments this week.

Writing: The students spent time revising their writing by learning how to add transitions between their reasons to make their paragraph flow better. They also worked on some editing for spelling and punctuation. We did not get to the publishing stage this week as planned.

Science: We worked on assembling our robot kits. It took lots of time and effort for the class to pop out all of the tiny parts for our robots and organize the parts as needed. We were also able to get the head and body of our robots assembled. These parts include the motor and solar panel to power it and will be the same on all types of robots. We tested if these parts were assembled correctly today. Out of 12 robots, only one robot had a running and functioning motor (the motor ran and the wheels actually turned). Two more robots had running motors, but the wheels would not turn. Next week we will spend time problem solving how to get the robots functioning so that the students can begin creating the different types of robots they selected.

Monday, Oct. 3: Library; Agriculture in the Classroom

Tuesday, Oct. 4: PE, Faith Formation, and Music

Wednesday, Oct. 5: Pride Day for Mass; Faith Formation

Thursday, Oct. 6: PE and Music

Friday, Oct. 7: NO SCHOOL (teacher PD); Color Run Day!

3rd Grade Math: We will continue to learn how to read, use, and create more graphs. Our lessons will included bar graphs, problem solving using data, and line plots.

4th Grade Math: We will continue with our multiplication unit. Our lessons will include estimating products and using the following strategies to multiply a 1-digit number by a multi-digit number: 

1. Distributive Property

2. Expanded Form

3. Partial Products

Reading: We are starting our first novel studies of the year! There will be two different studies going on in our room. One group will read Number the Stars, and the other group will read Stone Fox. Each day, we will focus on vocabulary and a certain reading skill. There will be a combination of whole group reading, partner reading, and silent reading used throughout these studies.

Phonics/Spelling: Our third spelling assessments will occur on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Please check your child's list from this week to see when he/she will be assessed. All students will receive their next set of words next week as well. Our focuses will be: Words Ending in -NT, Short vs. Long "u", Short vs. Long "e", Adding Suffixes to Base Words, and Open vs. Closed Syllable patterns.

Science: Diane Rinner will be in our classroom Monday for an Agriculture in the Classroom lesson. On the remaining days, we will be working on problem solving strategies for our robots and creating different types of robots (once our motors are all running and functioning).

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the nice weather!

God bless,

Mrs. Amy Heisdorffer

(309) 635-5876