October Already!

I can't believe we are already through our first week of October. I have all sorts of fun pictures to post but want to learn to use an new blog gadget that will allow me to put them on a little slide show first.

Math Packs

I hope everyone has been playing their math packs games. The games I sent are great practice in a fun way important math skill such as place value and basic facts which they will need to help them through the rest of grade 4 math. New games learned this week include Winning Track and Face Off. I will add a new game next week too. A really great one that kids can play themselves is Big Sums which they are all familiar with. 

We will continue in math this week with adding and subtracting 3 digit numbers.

Science

This week in science we have been looking at hazardous waste and what some of the different hazard symbols mean. Ask your child about them and what they should not do when they encounter them. We have also been looking at packaging of products and if it is friendly or excessive packaging. We discussed being aware of the products we buy and making choices based also on how much waste the packaging produces. A fun end to the week came with a challenge. Looking at some different packaging, we pretended that a new law meant no garbage to go to a landfill. Students listed all the new ways they could reuse packaging.

Remind your child that their garbage toy is due on Thursday. This is in my top 10 favourite activities for the year. I can't wait to see what they come up with.

I have sent an outline for the upcoming science test home with everyone.

Language Arts

We are half way through our novel study, "The Best School Year Ever" by Barbara Robinson. This book is full of belly laughs and all types of adventures. This week we hung up our life size characters from the story and the class began adding all the things they learned about each character so far onto them. We also talked about plot diagrams in stories and completed a large one for chapter 5. Ask your child about the rising action in the chapter and how it concluded.