Mrs. Riegel's Fourth Grade

We had a great week last week!

In Writing Workshop we continue to work on our essay writing. We learned some different strategies for generating essays; think of a person, a place, or an object and write long about it giving lots of details. We learned how to "freewrite" and just keep writing whatever pops into our head. As a class we discussed the qualities of good freewriting. It's amazing the volume of writing that these young writers are producing in their writers notebook!

In Reading Workshop we have been studying non-fiction text. Last week we studied main idea and came up with supporting details that went along with the main idea from a specific page or section. We broke up into small groups and each group read a page from a chapter in our social studies textbook. An expert from each group stood up and taught the class about the main idea of their page and three supporting details. They really enjoyed working together in small groups and using the different text features we have studied!

In math we are at the end of Topic 5. We have learned different strategies for how to break apart numbers to multiply, multiply using mental math, multiply using compensation, rounding to multiply, and using estimation to multiply. The students will be tested on this topic on Tuesday. Keep practicing those math facts over the holiday!

In Social Studies we researched the Algonquin Indians on the computers last week. We compared the Algonquins to the Iroquois Indians. The students loved getting on the laptops and I can tell they are really experts on navigating technology!

Thank you so much to those of you who volunteered and sent in items for our Thanksgiving Feast with Mrs. Klugman's class. The students all had such a great time. They enjoyed making hats, eating a delicious Thanksgiving lunch and most of all spending time with their buddies. We could not have done it without your support...thank you, thank you!