Dear Parents,

            Can you believe we are a quarter of the way through the school year? Report cards went home Friday, after a slight delay caused by a computer glitch. If you have questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me, by phone or email.

The new Math classes seem to be working well. As a fourth grade team we have decided to leave the topic of Multiplication for a few weeks, in order to cover Decimals. This fits better with the Every Day Math Program that we use as the basis for our teaching. So, you can expect to see Decimals work for a while! However, it is still expected that the children will learn their multiplication facts over the next weeks. Home support is very important to success in this area; a few minutes practice a few times a week is probably the best approach.

In Reading, new novels start Wednesday. We will be using a theme of Native American and early settler interaction, which works nicely with Social Studies. The books are The Double Life of Pocahontas by Jean Fritz, The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George, and The Courage Of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh. We will do a little more work on sequence of events, last week’s reading skill, and then will move on to inferring, if time permits. This is particularly difficult area for 4^th graders so we will spend some time on it.

In Writing we will be leaving the subject of personal narrative, and move into essay writing. Spelling will again have a phonetic focus; this week it will be oo sounds, as in “look” or “spoon”.

In Social Studies, the students will finish their Native American costumes, ready for Native American day on Friday. Thank you to our wonderful parent volunteers who help make this event possible. They are also learning about the hardships experienced by the early Jamestown settlers. There is a good website your child can visit that reinforces some of these concepts, www.portaportal.com Please sign in as a guest with the password pwilliam, go to the Social Studies section and look for John Smith Adventure and John Smith Adventure 2.

The Science projects have all been turned in, apart from a couple of children who got extensions for being out sick. There are some magnificent posters and creative models on display in the hallway and my classroom, and I encourage you to stop by and see them if you can. The new Science unit is Force, Motion, and Energy. This week we will do an experiment using balloons to explore the concepts of position and speed. Later in the week, weather permitting, we will go outside and collect time and position data (in a hopping race!) and then graph the data. Time and position add up to speed – one definition of speed is distance travelled in a unit of time.

The school currently has two charity collections going. The first is canned food for the Food Pantry, a charity with a very local effect that we help every year at about this time. If you can help with some non-perishable food that would be wonderful. Collection boxes are in the lobby. A completely different charity with an international reach is Pennies for Peace; the flier explains this really well, but I have to say that it is charity in which I most firmly believe. I have travelled in Nepal and visited a “well-equipped” school in the capital city of Kathmandu. The children were great but they had so little, and Nepal is a relatively enlightened country when it comes to education for girls. My husband has travclled extensively in Asia, including Pakistan, and can corroborate with first hand experience the education difficulties experienced in some areas, particularly for girls.

Important Dates:

                  3^rd Nov.                  Election day, no school for students. Teacher work day.

                  6^th Nov.                  Native American day.

                  9^th Nov.                  Jamestown presentations.

                  17^th Nov.                Early release.

Sincerely,

Clare Law

Contact information:

            School phone number: 951 5700

            School web address: www.mcps.org/mbeeks

            My email address: claw@mcps.org