January 2025
4th Grade
Important Dates
January 6th-17th - Classroom Spelling Bees
January 16th - Yearbook Photo Day
January 20th - Schools and Offices Closed, MLK Day
January 24th - STEM Expo
January 27th - PTA Night at Dave and Busters
January 28th - Last Day of Marking Period 2
January 29th - Professional Day for Teachers, No School for students
Curriculum
Language Arts
Students are in Unit 3, which focuses on poetry. This unit gives students tools and strategies for approaching poetry, training them in the strategies that poets use and equipping them to read and interpret poems. It gives them continual opportunities to create poems themselves, allowing them to practice what they have learned.
The poems in this unit represent a wide variety of time periods, from Kshemendra’s twelfth-century treatise on the responsibilities of poets to the work of living writers such as Sherman Alexie and Harryette Mullen.
To continue your child's learning at home, please reference the Caregiver Letter for conversation starters and additional information.
Compacted Math
Students will finish up Module 5 on fractions by completing Topics E, F, G, and H. Students will continue adding a mixed number to a fraction using unit form. Students learn to subtract mixed numbers by decomposing the total into a mixed number and an improper fraction to either subtract a fraction or a mixed number. Finally, they will extend the concept of representing repeated addition as multiplication, applying this familiar concept to work with fractions.
Math 4
Students will begin Module 5 which has a focus on fractions. In this 40-day module, students build on their Grade 3 work with unit fractions as they explore fraction equivalence and extend this understanding to mixed numbers. This leads to the comparison of fractions and mixed numbers and the representation of both in a variety of models. Benchmark fractions play an important part in students’ ability to generalize and reason about relative fraction and mixed number sizes.
Students need to continue practicing their basic multiplication facts daily at home to memorize them. You can use flashcards or taken about 10 minutes review basic facts with your child. There are also a variety of websites to use. Here are some to try out:
Science
Students will explore the human and animal eye to understand the parts of the eye and how it sees objects. Light reflected from an object’s surface and enters the eye. They will also analyze the shapes of different animals’ ears and develop an ear that will help humans hear better in the dark.
They will learn how animals adapt to their environment using their senses. Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information, which may be then processed by the animal’s brain. Animals are able to use their perceptions and memories to guide their actions.
Social Studies
Students will explore the origin, destination and goals of the North American explorers.
They will analyze the significance of key historical events leading to early settlements in colonial America. Lastly, students will analyze how key historical events impacted Native American societies.
