October 2015
Fall has arrived at Potomac Elementary!
Children now have the first month of fourth grade under their belts, and they proved ready
for success!
Curriculum Highlights:
In reading, students will be pairing informational articles and fictional texts to explain in
scientific concepts, as well as a character’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Students
synthesize background knowledge about science with textual evidence from the story to
explain their ideas and opinions and make inferences during collaborative discussions.
Students will also read literary non-fiction to use textual evidence to make inferences about
the interactions of organisms in a specific habitat. Students will be asked to paraphrase
portions of social studies text and summarize main ideas from texts to compare ways that
Native American Great Plains and Eastern Woodland societies used the natural environment
to meet their needs for food, clothing and shelter. Students examine how chronology is used
as a text structure to communicate a sequence of events.
In writing, students will write an informational piece about a Native American setting . Later
in the month, students build background knowledge and develop ideas when writing a
historical fiction piece during weeks 5-9. Additionally, they use their knowledge of character
development, setting, theme, and point of view while planning and writing their historical
fiction piece.
In science, students are studying life sciences and engineering by constructing their own
aquariums and terrariums. They are fine tuning their observation skills by looking closely
at details to record both qualitative and quantitative data. During October, we will be
looking closely at decomposers and how animals interact within ecosystems.
Fourth grade math students have been mastering place value concepts and rounding
numbers to any place. In October, we will turn to performing operations on multi-digit
numbers. Students will use their estimation skills to predict "reasonable" answers before
carrying out addition or subtraction problems and then use those benchmarks to ask
themselves if their answers make sense. They will hone their skills on basic problems and
then apply them to multi-step word problems. At the end of the month, we will focus on
comparison problems ("How many times larger was the diplodocus than the stegosaurus?").
Students will write equations to help identify the unknown in problems and solve them
using all four basic operations. You can help by continuing to ask your child to explain
HOW they are solving problems and what they did to break larger problems into smaller
ones. Encourage them to make sure their answers to homework problems "make sense."
Thinking about and talking about math problems rather than just performing the
calculations will help build the fluency students need to be comfortable writing about their
reasoning.
Dates: Oct. 2 Early Release
Oct. 12 – 14 Book Fair
Oct. 16 – No school for students or teachers
Oct. 30 – Halloween Party on pm classrooms time TBA