Busy 4th Graders!

Happy Saturday everyone!
I was just working on our lessons for next week, and we sure do have some BUSY days coming up! Not only are we diving into some new academic content, but we have quite a few "extra" activities, too:
**Tuesday, September 18th: School picture day. Be sure to either send your picture packet back to school with your kiddo, or order online. Every child has his/her photo taken on this day, whether he/she brought the packet back or not, since these are the photos that are used in the yearbook.
**Wednesday, September 19th: Agriculture Field Trip. This is a field trip put together by the FFA department at Buhler High. We are lucky that our school is located in Buhler - we hardly have to travel at all on this day! We leave a little before 9, and go across the street to a big shed to learn about local farming. Then we go two houses down to a farm to learn about 3 other aspects of local farming. Then a bus drives us to the high school where they provide lunch for us - usually a ham & cheese sandwich, banana, and a cookie - and they have a little petting zoo for us and a welding demonstration. And then they take us to one last farm to learn about 3 more aspects of local farming. We are usually back at school around 1:15.  The high schoolers work hard to make this an interesting, fun experience for the district's 4th graders!
**Tuesday, September 25: Parent/Teacher Conferences in the evening from 4 - 8 p.m.
**Thursday, September 27th: Parent/Teacher Conferences all day from 8 a.m. - 8 p.m.
**Friday, September 28th: No school!  Home football game at 7 p.m. against El Dorado.
**Saturday, October 6: Buhler Frolic   Some of your kiddos have signed up to run the 1-mile Fun Run with me!
We've been exploring some new topics in class, moving on from the review activities that we started the year with. I can't wait to share with you at conferences about the new reading program that we are using, and about the new spelling and math systems that we are starting.  We have been studying Kansas in social studies the past week. Our standards have us studying the 50 states in 4th grade, and this way we can compare the other states and regions to the state we are most familiar with. Wednesday we made 3D tipis (your kiddo should have brought his/hers home yesterday) and they were FANTASTIC! Check them out:

Read To Someone

Today we started a new skill in reading!
Our new reading system is structured differently than a traditional system. In a few weeks, when we are done training and practicing the different parts, our literacy time will have 3 "sections" each day. Each student will have one or two literacy requirements for the day, and at least one section where he/she can CHOOSE which type of literacy he/she WANTS to do. Right now we are practicing how to do those activities independently, so that I can work individually with students on highly personalized reading skills during that time each day. So far we've been honing skills that most students have done before, in some form or another. But today we started "Read To Someone", which was so much fun! There's just something exciting about your teacher assigning you to sit down with a friend and share your book with him/her!  We start by practicing in very short time periods, to make SURE that we are doing everything just right, and then add time (we call it "stamina") each day until we get to the full 20 minutes. Today everyone got to read to his/her partner for 3 minutes, and everyone is excited about building our stamina tomorrow!