News From Mrs. Cavoto's Room

Hello,

Welcome to 4th grade. This year will be filled with many exciting changes and new concepts to learn. As you know already your child may have three different teachers that they work with throughout the day. If your child is in my homeroom, I will be their science and social studies teacher.

As you read through my news letters, I will let you know of important dates, tests and other things to remember. However, you will need to go to your child's language arts and math teachers' web site to get the information from those classes. It may different than mine.

Please feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions.

Things to remember this week:

No School on Monday - Labor Day

Thursday, Sept 4th, at 7:00 p.m. RTI Meeting for K-5 at Prairieview for those people who would like to find out more about it.

New to lunch: Chicken patty will be offered everyday

Curriculum Night will be on September 11th at 7:00 p.m.

Reading This week in reading we will continue our review of the previewing and predict reading strategy. We will work with "Puzzlers" to help reinforce this skill. We will also discuss Authors' View Points. The students will learn new vocabulary words and read the story Grandfather's Journey.

Language Arts This week we spent some time getting to know each other. The students conducted interviews with their classmates. We reviewed the rules of giving oral presentations and then then they practiced speaking in front of the class as they introduced their friends.
This week the children will begin a capitalization and punctuation unit. They will review the different kinds of sentences and and correctly place capital letters and end marks in them. They will review captialization of names of people, places, things, pets, and titles of people.

Spelling We will begin our first spelling unit this week. There will be a spelling test on Friday.
Look for the list to come home on Tuesday of this week.

Science Last week in science the students reviewed the safety procedures to be used in science. This week we will begin a new unit. The unit will focus on the Big Idea: "You can answer your science questions by carrying out careful investigations". The first lesson will focus on tools for Inquiry. The students will compare the difference between standard and nonstandard units of measure and draw conclusions based on their findings. They will experiment with different tools used for Inquiry and categorize them into their different uses: handling, measuring or observing.

There will be an open book quiz over lesson 1 on Friday. The students should bring home their books to review the tools and their uses. They should also be thinking about why it is important to use standard units of measure.

Social StudiesThis week the students will begin a unit on The U.S. government. They learn about the constitution and why it is important. They will learn about the three levels of government and describe the responsibilities of each.