What's+Happening+in+Room+09+in+November?

=**General News**= November already! Thanks for all your help last week with both the field trip to Seattle Children's Theater and our Halloween party. Jack Prelutsky was a fabulous guest. His assembly was very enjoyable. It was a busy and fun week. Progress reports are coming home today. Be sure to congratulate your child on all of the work that they completed during the month. There is lots to celebrate. Also, please make sure that your child follows through with completing the missing assignments.

=**﻿Curriculum News**=

**Math**
We are still in our statistics unit of study, Shape of the Data. We have done a few line plots, a few bar graphs, etc. Now we begin to interpret the data. Then we will be taking a look at probability. Our Halloween Hunch activity was a ton of fun and there were some surprising results. I will post a summary of the "taste graph" for all of you who were not able to be at Blakely for Halloween. It will be on the Edmodo site later in the week. A fun thing that happened was that the day before Halloween we received an email reply from Kelly Ford the VP of Marketing for Hunch to an email query I sent to her regarding Halloween polls. She sent the children some data about their members' favorite Halloween candy. They enjoyed seeing the results knowing that 28,000 members were polled. Please make sure your children are practicing their facts. The majority of them do not have mastery of their addition and subtraction facts. They should be doing the GYMS in First in Math. To get a 3 on their report cards a month from now they will need to show mastery of all addition and subtraction facts. Also we are focusing on subtraction, the more complicated processes - subtraction with zeros, regrouping twice, etc.
 * Thursday Math** is going well. Three fourths of the students have been tackling perimeter and area. The others are preparing for the Math Olympiad test that takes place mid-month.

Writing
This is a good group of writers! Getting better all the time. They just finished writing their second big piece - My Favorite Place. There were some clever choices - my refrigerator, my grandpa's garden, my hammock, etc. Very well written. It was the first time many of them had used a mind map prewrite. We will be spending the month working on prewrites - mindmaps, outlines, and question writing. Handwriting. Moving forward with this. Every child will have a goal for the month of November in his/her chosen script - print or cursive. Some examples: I will write on the line, I will only slant my letters in one direction. I will not put tails on letters that don't have them, etc.

=﻿**Reading**= The Island Reading Logs are coming along. I think about a third of the class is now finished with all 10 books! When students finish, they should continue to read on the theme. They should take the AR tests, but do not need to continue on with the summary/fact writing. There is a //MY EXTRA BOOKS// sheet on which to record the additional titles. At this point, ALL the children should be reading their book selections independently. Parents should not be reading parts of the book or buddy reading now. If this seems necessary than the book is not at the student's independent level and they should read something easier. Same is true of the summaries. Proofreading assistance is much appreciated but ALL students should be doing their own writing. We will all be reading a book together starting later in the week. __Island of the Blue Dolphins__. This is a great book and fun to share as a class. We will talk about theme, key events, setting, etc. All logs due on Nov. 18th. The next day all of the fourth graders that have completed the log will participate in an afternoon of fun. Students will choose to play board games, do Thanksgiving crafts, or watch a movie.

=﻿Social Studies= Map skills. Getting the basics down. Latitude and longitude next.

=﻿Innovator of the Month= Our Sept. Innovator was Andy Warhol as you know. In October we took a look at innovator, Caterina Fake of Flickr and Hunch fame. The study of these two creative individuals complemented our math topics - multiplication (arrays) and data interpretation. This month we will be learning about the innovator - Jerry Sternin. Mr. Sternin worked for Save the Children in Vietnam and solved a big problem (childhood malnutrition) that existed in many small villages.