Welcome!

Hi families!

Welcome to another exciting year on Team 3/4! I couldn’t be more excited to get this year started with my new crew of learners. I’m back from a dually refreshing and adventurous summer, feeling full of energy and inspiration to share with the students. This blog is one of the ways that I will keep you informed as to the goings on in our class. I’ll post updates, important information, pictures, stories, and student work for you to enjoy. Please let me know if there is anything that you’re wondering about that you’d like me to focus on in my posts. This blog is for you!

Our first day together was fantastic. It felt great to see returning faces and ask them to step up as fourth grade leaders on the team. I also loved welcoming new students to my class and our school, introducing them to our classroom culture and expectations.

Today we focused on connecting with one another and beginning the important work of building our team.  We talked about the words “why” and “because” and how important these words become in the third and fourth grades. We explored some essential questions about how we want our classroom to feel and function. For example, “Why is school important to you?” and “What do the students need to do in order to have a successful year?" and "How should our classroom feel every day?" We also began to get organized and get to know the flow of daily life here. 

We also explored the concept of inference. Students looked at images, identified what they noticed, what they already know about the things they noticed, and identified what they could infer based on the evidence and their schema. Later in the day we did the same with the cover of our first text of the year, E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It is one of my all-time favorite books! It's about a brother and sister who run away from home and move into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have a fun museum-themed project planned to get the year started with a bang, and part of that is a series of field trips to local museums. Art Teacher Julie and I will be taking the kids to the Legion of Honor in the city on September 3. Drivers? Let me know if you’re available! We’ll leave first thing at 8:30.

3^rd and 4^th graders will have PE on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:15- 12:00. Make sure that students have appropriate footwear for their first PE class on Thursday!