Back To School Night is Tonight!

Good Evening! We are looking forward to seeing you all here at The Berkeley School tonight. Since tonight is Back To School Night (and we have plenty of information for you) this blog post will be short and sweet-- we will leave the announcements and information for our evening tonight!

Reminders:

Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home Friday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

Also, it is strongly encouraged to practice spelling the state names, especially the ones that are circled in green! 

We had a guest appearance from Sima this morning in math to teach us a new game, Boxed In. This game re-emphasized our work with arrays and finding the factors of different numbers. 

Back To School is Tomorrow Night!

Homework

Reading - 20 minutes.  Be sure to record the Title and pages read in your planner (this year's version of a reading log).

State Spelling- Practice spelling the State names (Alabama-Idaho). Spell twice and say the word out loud to learn the spelling of state names by Friday.

4th Grade Math:  Option 1 (Things that come in groups) or Option 2 (Arrays challenge).

Reminders:

Back to School Night is tomorrow evening, September 20, 6:00-8:00pm.  We look forward to seeing you here! 

Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home Friday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

 

4^th Grade Math: Today we started math with a Quick Image warm up. Students were shown a group of dots for three seconds and then were asked to recreate the dots in the correct formation. The purpose of this exercise was for students to see how other’s think of numbers and how to form different types of equations with the same answer. After our warm up, we got back together with our partners to work on arrays.

Today in Strawberry

We continued to work on our poems, perfecting them in our final drafts. Many of the students have gotten so into writing poems they’ve written two, some three!

This afternoon we met with our buddies from Laurel Creek. Buddy partners worked together to create a collaborative drawing. They were asked to communicate with each other and make sure that both partners had marks on all four quadrants of the paper. Many of our buddies learned new drawing techniques from each other and created some beautiful drawings!

Buddies:

Homework

Reading - 20 minutes.  Be sure to record the Title and pages read in your planner (this year's version of a reading log).

 

State Spelling- Practice spelling the State names (Alabama-Idaho). Spell twice and say the word out loud to learn the spelling of state names by Friday.

4th Grade Math Homework: Option 1 and Option 2     Information about Unit 1.

5th Grade Math:  Please check Cerrito Creek's blog for an overview of 5th grade math homework.

Reminders:

Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home Friday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

Back to School Night is Thursday evening, September 20, 6:00-8:00pm.  We look forward to seeing you here!  

4th Grade Math:  Today we dove further into our study of arrays and how they relate to multiplication. We used colored tiles to represent multiplication factors and then split in to partners to work further with arrays. Partner pairs worked together to cut out grid paper arrays and learned how to make factor rainbows. Students chose Option #1 or Option #2 for homework. Along with the homework, students took home a blue letter informing families of the unit we will be studying in math. 

Today in Strawberry
We started out this morning with our creative hats on. Students walked into the room and sat at a table with old tools and antique machines-- they spent 20-25 minutes drawing "still life" photos, concentrating on details and pencil techniques. 

We continued to work on our poems during Writer's Workshop and even got to some final drafts!

During Reading Workshop, we reviewed the parts of a paragraph and how to write a quality topic sentence. 

We began our State Study this afternoon. Students chose a state to research and used the school laptops to find information on their state. Between Cerrito and Strawberry Creek, we will cover all the states and we're looking forward to hear all about them!
Morning Drawing Activity
 




State Research Project

Monday September 17th

Welcome back to school!

No homework assigned tonight due to Rosh Hashanah.

Reminders:
Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home yesterday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

Back to School Night is Thursday evening, September 20, 6:00-8:00pm.  We look forward to seeing you here!

4th Grade Math: Arrays, arrays arrays!  This week we will be exploring mathematical arrays as they relate to multiplication.  We are also exploring different ways to show numbers, such as 425 using operations (i.e. 40+60+200+70+55).

Writing Workshop: The students picked up from lour work last week and continued to create topic webs to use for creating poems related to family and friends.

Sentence study:  During our language arts time today we reviewed sentence structure, identified the key features of a complete sentence and corrected sentences.   

Correcting sentences:

 

Happy Friday!

Reminders:
Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home yesterday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

Back to School Night is Thursday evening, September 20, 6:00-8:00pm.  We look forward to seeing you here!



Two more firsts for our start of the school year:

1st Cerritoberry meeting:  Strawberry and Cerrito Creek come together each Friday morning for activities and games.  Today we went outside to play group games including, "Giants, Wizards & Elves."

1st Friday Academic Flex:  On Fridays after lunch we conduct a homework planner check (currently doing this each day as well) to be sure students are keeping up on their reading log and assignments.  Academic Flex is a time for students to finish incomplete assignments before moving on to "choices."  Today we went straight to choices in order to introduce sewing, painting and modeling clay as possible activities to select from.  Several students began making pillows while others worked on the map puzzle, the community agreements poster, read, drew or played games.

Writer's workshop:

 A writing project focused on friendships, family and ourselves

 Flex time: planning a pillow

 Decorating our community agreements poster

 Sewing