Lessons Learned December 6-10

Reading:
Our reading focus skill is Author's Purpose. Author's write for various reasons. The four main reasons that author's write text is to Persuade, Inform, Entertain, or to Describe.

Persuade: Trying to get readers to do something, buy something, or believe something
Inform: Tells how to do something, gives important information and facts about a person, place or thing
Entertain: Tells a personal story, tells something funny or sad, or used to teach a lesson
Describe: Provides several descriptive details about a person, place or thing

We are also Reading the story, The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg. Chris Van Allsburg is our fourth grade author study. Therefore, we will be reading and studying many of his books.

Writing:
In writing we continue to work with narrative prompts. We finished our study on dialogue so we can now properly include conversations in our stories. We have now begun to focus on formatting our writing into 5 paragraph essays, expository writing.

5 Paragraph Expository Format:
P1: Engaging beginning - Restate the topic in your own way and state three reasons why ______ ...
P2: Transition word, explain your first reason providing vivid details
P3: Transition word, explain your second reason providing vivid details
P4: Transition word, explain your third reason providing vivid details
P5: Transition word, engaging ending, restate the topic, add feelings and connections
Along with expository writing, we've also began working with report writing. We practiced our skills on writing reports by completing short reports on animals. We used geographic magazines to research inofrmation on various animals. Additionally, each student chose a famous African American Poet to research for their report writing published piece.

Math: 
In math we have continued to work in chapter 13 with fractions. However, we have also been reviewing concepts discussed in previous chapters. We reviewed place value,  rounding, double digit subtraction and addition with regrouping, and our multiplication tables.
We have also learned two different strategies (standard algorithm and the box method) on how to multiply double, triple, and quadruple digit numbers.
***Parents please help your children practice their basic math facts: addition, subtraction, mulitplication and division.***