Curriculum Update

Here a quick curriculum update about what is currently happening in the 4th grade classroom.

We are now on Chapter 8 in our religion books. We are learning about God’s Law. This is the beginning of our in-depth study of the Ten Commandments. After this chapter, each chapter will focus on a commandment. Last week we learned about the Feast of the Epiphany and discussed the two required prayers for 4th graders to learn which are the Prayer for Peace and the Memorae.

We are on Unit 4 Equations and Word Problems. This is a more difficult unit for 4th graders as they learn to write equations with a symbol or variable for the unknown number to represent the problem. They are also asked to represent statements of multiplicative comparisons as multiplication equations. Later on in this chapter they will also learn to write equations to represent problems with more than one step. Some students are being challenged trying to write the situation equation when it calls for it, but I expect that all students will be able to write their solution equations for their problems.

We started our new novel before break, Esperanza Rising. This is by the same author as Riding Freedom and will allow the students to complete an author study when we are done.

Infused in our literature block this trimester will also be informational texts. These are short passages about a variety of topics. On Monday students read about Rosa Parks for example. Tomorrow we will start reading part of What was the Gold Rush? to help support their upcoming unit in Social Studies. We will also be utilizing Time for Kids and other news articles as students learn to break down these informational texts, summarize them, have opinions and support their opinions with facts from the text.

This trimester we have been focusing on informational writing as students researched, took notes, wrote rough drafts and have been typing final drafts about their mission. It is my hope that we will complete these essays by next week. We will start to write written responses to the texts that we are using in literature to further work on informational writing the rest of the trimester.

Students will also continue to work on their writing in regards to our literature standards as they explain different aspects of our class novel and write character paragraphs and responses to literature as we read.

We continue to move forward in our grammar book and will learn about verb phrases, irregular verbs, and verb tenses.