It's a new year...sort of!

Welcome to 2011! I hope all of you have had a great start to a new year. This also means we are halfway through this year in 4th grade. It also means it is crunch time in preparing for our first TAKS test this year -- writing! There are a few things you might want to know about the Writing TAKS, so that you can help your child prepare at home. I hope what I've written below really helps you understand what the TAKS is looking for.

Guide to the Writing TAKS:

- Your child will have a to write a composition (specifically a personal narrative) responding to a prompt. Some example prompts include: 'Write about something surprising that happened to you.' 'Write about your favorite person.' 'Write about something you found.'

- When writing their composition, it is important to remember that they shouldn't write about experiences that took an entire month, week, or day (these are called "watermelon moments"). The experiences we write about have usually happened over a very short amount of time, usually only a few minutes (these are called "seed moments").

- When choosing the seed moment, it is best to think of (for example) your favorite person and then one moment that happened with that person. This is what we called "exploding a moment". We never want to write a list of things describing your favorite person.

- In order to "explode a moment", we use our five senses to describe everything that happened at that exact moment. It's amazing how much detail we can use when we write with all of our senses (these are called "snapshots").

How does this help you as a parent?

If you know what kind of compositions we are writing, you can have your kids tell you stories about things that happened at school or playing with their friends the same way we would write them. It's really hard for kids to use so much detail in their writing if they don't use it when they tell stories on a regular basis. Ask your kids to tell you, in detail, about the most surprising or most interesting or most frustrating moment of their day.

Important Upcoming Dates:

The calendar to the left is always the most current and should be checked weekly!

What we're learning this week...

Math - decimals

Science - soil

Social Studies - The Texas Revolution

Writing - personal narratives

Reading - nonfiction text

Homework:

Daily - Continue practicing those multiplication facts. Read 20 minutes.

Monday - NO SCHOOL

Tuesday - TAKS Editing Practice (not available online)

Wednesday - Decimals HW (not available online)

Thursday - Reading Comprehension