Mrs. Drzayich's Class: Week 30: Happy Spring Break!

Hello, Spring Break! I can’t decide if parents are excited about Spring Break or not, but we teachers and students sure are. Here’s what this week looked like:

We have continued work on Maintaining Conversations this week and the whole class has surprised us! We have played some games to practice listening skills and done plenty more role plays—encourage them to keep working on this at home over Spring Break. If you/they need a refresher, watch the videos on this blog.

Sage testing. This has been a new experience for our fourth graders. Usually students don’t participate in writing testing until 5^th or 6^th grade, but this year all grades 3-6 are tested in writing. We worked really hard up until this week to practice writing thoughtful and relevant responses in anticipation for this, and our participating students worked really hard during the test. Great job! After break we will have testing in reading, math and science. Wish them luck!

More of our plants have begun to sprout and we are thrilled about it! While we’ve been waiting for them to grow, we’ve done activities using adjectives to describe our plants, taken data on class favorites, written opinion pieces on plants and learned about the life cycle of a plant, among other things. We are sending them home with students today. Make sure to put it in a sunny spot and water it daily. As the plants grow, take a picture or have your child draw a picture of it to bring back and show the class.

In writing many of us have been practicing writing our opinions and giving good reasons for it. On Friday, however, we took a break from this and wrote a bit about our plans for Spring Break. We will put these pages together to make a class book. I invited students in class to take a picture of themselves doing what they had written about over Spring Break and bring it to school on Monday or Tuesday so we can glue them in to our book. If your child would like to do this, please make sure the picture is with them on Monday or Tuesday, already printed and ready to glue on to a book page.

Friday was also an unexpectedly fun day. For art we made some baby chicks while talking about the things that change during spring, such as baby animals being born. We also had another class invite us to join them in making milkshakes as part of a cooking activity! Needless to say, the students loved it.

Homework Heroes: