Another late post

Hello,

We had a staff meeting about the upcoming NECAP testing.  Fourth grade testing will be from Tuesday, October 9, to Thursday the 11th.  There will be two sessions a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  The fourth grade team met after the staff meeting (thus me writing this past 6:00) and agreed not to give any homework on any night before testing. 

Math talk: I have been fascinated to see the struggle with number lines over the past couple of days.  Despite knowing many concepts beyond number lines, many students don't have a very good mental picture of what a number line is, how it should be constructed, or how it can be used.  Kids formed a numberline from 0 to 1000 in the hall this morning.  I started with eleven kids, each representing a multiple of 100. (0, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000)  They didn't know that they should be equidistant apart.  Once they realized that, they had a lot of trouble getting evenly spaced.  I added a few more students, these representing 50, 750, 950.  Interestingly enough, they all tried to recalibrate their spaces to continue to be equidistant apart.  Trying to get them to understand that 100 should be closer to 50 than 200, was very difficult.  We will continue to work with numberlines to help us understand relationships between numbers.  I especially like doing the human numberlines.

Ask your child about subjects and predicates.  Ask them what this sentence means: A stinky, rotten, hairy banana destroyed a village with TNT. 

We had our first fire alarm of the year where I was separated from the class.  They were in P.E. when it happened.  They did a great job.  My ears are still buzzing, however.  You wouldn't want to be in this building when it goes off.  It is ridiculously loud. 

New root word for our vocabulary words is spec, meaning see or look.  They are noticing these roots now in their reading.  Very cool to see.  We will keep doing activities to review past words to keep them at the forefront of their minds. 

All for now.  Have a great night.

Mr. Shea