Classroom Snapshot for Grades 4/5
The letter below is a sample of a monthly email communication by 4/5 class teachers to the parents of their students. This is a detailed account of the academic lessons that occur in the classroom, including upcoming events and acknowledgements to parents who so graciously assisted in the classroom, on field trips or with daily logistics.
Our first newsletter gives you a picture of each of the subject areas that are taught in the classroom, along with some of what is on the horizon.
Thank you for your support,
Your teachers
Mathematics: 4th grade
During the first week of school, the 4/5 students stayed with their teachers and played math games centered on multiplication, finding patterns, addition, subtraction, and estimation. The 4th graders started this year with a math self-assessment. This activity helped them reflect on their feelings about different areas in math, including both their strengths and challenges. From there, we have been thinking about how math is used in our everyday lives and the ways to represent a number. We have been working with place value through the millions and expanded form. Short quizzes on addition and subtraction facts through twenty have become a part of every math class, and each student will be tracking his/her progress throughout the weeks. The 4th grade will also be learning the algorithm for adding and subtracting large numbers with regrouping (what we used to call carrying and borrowing) and estimation.
Mathematics: 5th grade
We began the year with a review of multi digit multiplication and division with single digit divisors as a review of what the students learned last year. Now they're working with double and triple-digit numbers and using grid paper to get them in the habit of keeping neat rows and columns.
The class has started working on fractions and soon will be adding percents and decimals to their work. We use various fraction games to help them become familiar with how fractions are all about dividing parts of the whole. We also teach them the algorithms and give them problems to solve on paper, emphasizing neatness, care, and accuracy. As a way of understanding that fractions are really a form of division, the students are learning about prime factorization.
Much of the fall curriculum will be devoted to this unit, since it is an important part of the 5th grade standards in the Curriculum Guide.
Literature
For literature these past few weeks, we have been reading Bandit's Moon, a story about a young girl's adventures with the legendary bandit, Joaquin Murieta. We have been working on comprehension skills through the use of post-its while reading. So far, the students are putting post-its in their books when they come across new characters, interesting text, connections, difficult words, and similes. The students have written summaries of specific chapters in the book. We will also discuss how to identify when something is confusing and how to ask questions about the books we are reading. The students will be working up to discussion groups facilitated by the teachers. The final project is a wanted poster of either of the main characters in the book.
Writing
Some very excited 4th and 5th graders received their Writer's Notebooks a couple of weeks ago. We asked that each student decorate the cover to really make these notebooks unique to each of them. We recently talked about how to think of ideas when "writer's block" is in our way. For the next several weeks, we will be focusing on different strategies for beginning a new piece of writing. Soon, we will start our memoir genre study. The students will immerse themselves in memoirs to become familiar with the format and unique qualities of the genre. As we are reading others' memoirs, we will begin writing our own.
Social Studies
We are studying Native American history, beginning 40,000 years ago and moving up to the age of explorers/invaders. While this history is going on we are also looking at what it means to be stereotyped for race, color, gender, or other reasons. This is integrated into our Inside-Out? program as a contemporary and relevant issue as well. Students will interview an adult about a time that person experienced some sort of stereotyping. After Columbus and the unit on explorers/invaders, we gradually move up into the 19th century California with the gold rush and the railroad.
The Play
The play this year is part of the California history unit. Embedded within the songs is a fair portion of the content of what they are learning. Lessons about the days of the gold rush and the railroad in California are taught in the late winter and early spring. One of the 4/5 teachers has written the story and songs for this year's play.
Science
We have begun our year with a unit on levers and pulleys. The 4th and 5th graders are learning about the different parts of these simple machines and how useful they are in our daily lives. We began our exploration of building and using levers. Ask your child about what common classroom materials we used to construct our own levers! Students will also collect, organize, and analyze date from our lever experiments with spring scales.
Special Time
During this time, we will discover Africa for the first half of the year. The students will be exposed through books, pictures, artifacts and stories to Africa and its land, its culture, its peoples, its 545 dialects, its history and its decaying economy despite its natural riches. In order to better understand this vast and diverse continent, we will divide it into four regions, the North, the West, the East, and the South. In our effort to make the class lively, engaging and interesting, we will invite guest speakers who will share their experience and knowledge. Lastly, we will sample authentic African cuisine.
Test Preparation
We will integrate test-taking skills into various areas of the curriculum. In math, writing, and reading comprehension the students benefit from a variety of teaching methods, including both progressive, hands-on methods and memorization.
Inside Out
Community is a very important aspect of the 4/5, and we spend a lot of time at the beginning of the year establishing what it means to be a part of our community. The 4th and 5th graders started with thinking about what their hopes and dreams may be for this year. In each class, we brainstormed ideas about what our right and responsibilities should be at school. With those, we wrote our class constitutions. We also had the students create a timeline of their lives as a window into their lives. A theme we are discussing currently is stereotyping and how it can hurt ourselves and others.
Under the Skies of Tilden Park
Sometime during the third or fourth week of September, the students in the 4th and 5th grades of Aurora School camp together under the skies of Tilden Park in the hills of Berkeley. Led by their teachers on a journey that takes them from the walls of the school to the forests of the park and the spirit of the outdoors, the students experience a unique bonding with their classmates and teachers in a way that can only happen while they are sitting in a circle under a blanket of fog, singing songs from the class play around the campfire, or silently watching a deer run across the trail as they are hiking in the fading light of evening.
Though many of them have not slept away from their parents very often or even at all, each and every student begins to experience and understand the importance of working together; one of the most important skills necessary not only for survival in the woods but in the world.
We are fortunate to have an incredibly supportive group of parent chaperones, some of whom drive to the campsite to prepare dinner, breakfast, and lunch, some to pitch tents and set up camp, and some to spend their night in a tent with 3, 4, or 5 students. When the evening is over and the campsite is clean enough to not even tempt the raccoons and in the early morning before the sun has barely risen and the excellent coffee is steaming, it is obvious that this Tilden Overnight could never happen without the dedicated members of the parents of our students.
Our Tilden Overnight is also a preparation for another overnight in the spring during which we spend 5 days at an educational camp which is a little farther from home. Our program in the spring embodies a similar purpose to our Tilden Overnight with the addition of the staff at the camp, who facilitate the curriculum of the educational camp.
As teachers, we begin to see new sides of our students during these overnights, appreciate them even more for who they are, and understand how they utilize their strengths and meet their challenges. As teachers, we can step back from the walls of the school and take a breath of fresh air in the forests of the park and the spirit of the outdoors and use these moments to refresh our experience of education, leadership, and community.