Tierney's Tidbits in 3/4!

* No School on Monday, January 20th in observance of Martin L. King Jr. Day.

* We will take our winter, I-Ready benchmark tests in ELA & Math during the last two weeks of January.

The month of December was a challenge for our classroom attendance goal. The cold, flu and stomach bug certainly took their toll. Never fear...while we are encouraging perfect or near perfect attendance, we are also realistic and know that illness is always part of the equation this time of year. We continue to encourage students to be present at school as much as possible, when they are feeling well, and they can also attend school if they have a mild cold and not running a fever. We do, however, appreciate your support in following our school's health policy for more severe illness by keeping them home if necessary. 🤧

Speaking of which, we always appreciate a donation of tissues! 😉

• We love learning about Outer Space. This reading & science unit takes us so many directions with our learning. We have read several books about the first moon landing in 1969, we learned about the phases of the moon, and we have been creating a Google Slides presentation about the planets in our solar system.
• Spelling - We will be taking a step away from our spelling book for a few weeks to focus on some much-needed spelling skills that are not included in the book. Our first skill will be learning how to spell words with the suffix endings -tion, -sion, and -cian. These can be very tricky words to learn, so we encourage students to practice them at home. A copy of the list will be sent home next week.
• In ELA, we just finished a unit of learning nonfiction text features and now we head into learning about an author's point of view. Your student should be able to recognize if a story is told in first- or third-person point of view by identifying important clue words. They have also spent some time speaking in a third-person point of view this past week to cement this new skill.

We love learning and exploring with STEM activities. This month we will learn about snowflakes. Besides the fact that snowflakes make winter a ton of fun, they are also a pretty amazing part of nature and provide a ton of opportunities to incorporate math and science in our learning. We have already learned how to make paper snowflakes that decorate our classroom. Be on the lookout on how we will create snowflakes using other materials and supplies and how we can tie this into learning math and science. We will also learn about Snowflake Bently and his fascination with snowflakes.

Green Screen Fun! We love to show our work by using a green screen and iPad. We learned how to use this technology last month when we completed our Christmas Around the World projects. Soon we will be using this technology to showcase our learning about the solar system. Be on the lookout, we may share some of our videos with you.

Let's Multiply! Our math class routine is often divided into different topics and activities throughout the week. Our main topic for both grade levels consist of learning multiplication. The third grade is continuing with learning their basic multiplication facts and the fourth grade is learning how to multiply with multidigit numbers. In the coming weeks both grade levels will also work together to learn geometry, area & perimeter. In addition to learning these skills, we also dabble in other topics like the Stock Market Game, real-life math skills, and math brain teasers and logic puzzles.

Building a Thinking Classroom Routine - This year our classrooms have begun to implement a new math routine to encourage deeper thinking of math. As part of the BTC routine our students are given a math problem or "pepper task" that is described as being mild, medium, or spicy! Students work together to discuss, solve, and illustrate their thinking while using a vertical whiteboard. This routine provides our students with opportunities to think deeply about math and see that math can be solved in many different ways.

Check out this "spicy" Esti-Mystery pepper task. Can you solve it? This is just one example of many different types of problems that students need to solve as part of this routine.