Dear Families,

It is hard to believe it is December!  It was wonderful meeting with you and hope that we can continue to be partners in your child’s success at school.

We are just about finished writing commentary.  The unit stressed many aspect of essay writing including:

• transitional phrases
• essay structure
• the ability to elaborate evidence and details to support a stated opinion.
• the ability to use articles to cite specific evidence
• the ability to use correct comma use

As always these is content taken from our common core standards.  I always assess before I teach in order to best meet the needs of the class.  After break, we will begin two new units.  Close reading of short texts and a grammar unit.  The purpose of the close reading of short texts is to practice nonfiction and narrative reading strategies in more complex texts.  Strategies that will be taught include, but are not limited to monitoring for meaning and using “fix up” strategies to increase better comprehension, identifying the structure of a passage to best understand main idea and the author’s message, compare themes across texts etc.  You can find a helpful article here. While I am teaching this I will be teaching small groups for children who need support in these areas.  Graphic organizers as well as smaller teacher ratio will help children who have fallen behind.  In grammar, we will focus on the Common core standards for 4th grade.  We will cover, but are not limited to subject, verb agreement, comma usage with coordinating clauses, etc.  Common core standards can be found here.

In the spirit of diversity and inclusion, Donna has allowed us to decorate our classroom for the holidays!  I have asked several of our class members to bring in Menorahs, stars of David, christmas lights, snowman, snowflakes, etc.  In February, we will decorate our class for the Chinese New Year!  I ordered classroom books that honor all holidays in December, but if you have any at home it would be great to borrow them for the next few weeks.

Please, periodically, use School Loop to check your child’s progress as well as find useful documents to support your child at home.