Report Cards, Letter Grades, Library, A Lock down drill

Notices:

  

Great Job School!
 We collected 1 thousand 4 hundred 80 granola bars.

Scholastic book orders due tomorrow

Yes it is true:  If your child received a C+ it means they are perfectly meeting grade 4 expectations in all ways.  I find that this first report card, with actual letter grades, can be quite hard on many of the students who do not connect their daily work habits with their letter grade.  B's and A's mean they go beyond grade level expectations.  The first report card is a starting point and it is more important to work to improve from now until the final report card in June. Grade 4 is the step from primary to intermediate and students are now expected to produce better, greater and more  polished work than in the primary grades.

We began the day as usual with silent reading.  Silent reading is a great time for those students who love to read.  To start the day in a fantastic world somewhere in time sets the students creative brains on fire.  Those reluctant and slow to get to reading students, with daily reading will one day find the perfect type and level of books for them, if they go beyond their comfort level of Captain Underpants, or Dr. Seuss.  When they do they may find they have a lifelong love of reading that will enrich their lives now and forever.

At 9:30 we had our library tech class with Mr. K in the Library/computer lab.  Mr. K is currently reading stories from across Canada.  Today he talked about the Northern Tlingit people and read a fable about raven.  

After recess we continued with our discussion from yesterday on how to treat people, on what they wanted to be remembered for, again using the Sneetches video from yesterday.

At 11:00 we had a Lock down drill where we had to sit silently away from the doors, windows closed and doors locked.  The community police liaison came in and said we had done an excellent job. When the door was knocked on, during the drill, no one called out.   Well done everyone and let's hope that you never have a real lock down drill in your life.

In math we looked at number reading, placement and reading large numbers.  Ask your child to show you how to read large numbers to see if they got it.  Write a number up to the tens of millions.  Or just have them explain what the red numbers are.

12 345 678

(at the start of the lesson many students said the red 4 was millions, reading the number and it's place value from right to left as such.... ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions ... in fact the number is tens of thousand .... and after ones of thousands should be read as tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, ones of millions, tens of millions etc.)

Great day and well done everyone. See you tomorrow for a new day of work that will begin to be used for next report card.  Test tomorrow is Spelling and explaining what is supposed to happen during a lock down drill and why. Take care Mr. W.

P.S. Please take extra time hand washing as many classes have students sick and away.