Hi All,
It's definitely spring.... and we are all ready for a break!  This has been a good week, but it has been hard to stay focused on academics.  I know we will all come back refreshed after a week away.

We finished up our fraction unit, and I am really pleased with the growth I see in ALL of the students! They know how to put fractions in order, add and subtract both fractions and decimals, and multiply fractions by whole numbers. That's a lot!  We celebrated by baking cookies and banana bread AFTER making the kids use their math skills to double and/or half the recipes. After vacation we will revisit multiplication and division with larger numbers. We will also do a lot of reviewing before we begin the SBAC tests.

We also finished up our reading unit about the Revolutionary War. We are not only experts on the topic, but we are also really good at using non-fiction reading strategies to get the most from our books. We were going to start a historical fiction unit after vacation, but there won't be enough time since we have testing and so many other 4th grade activities. Instead, we will go back to free reading and spend a lot of time reviewing skills we learned earlier in the year.

The students are still writing their final piece. This is a huge project which includes a narrative, an essay, and 2 chapters that are informational. Once the writing is finished, the kids will turn these pieces into magazines. I look forward to seeing the final results!

Finally, we finished up our Vermont history unit. Each student chose a person, place, or event from Vermont's history and researched it to find out how it impacted Vermont. We are all learning from each other and enjoying the research process. After vacation, we will begin working on our Vermont history musical!

That's all the news from this week. I hope you all have a restful week and enjoy a lot of time together!