Ms. McLean’s 4th Grade Newsletter
	Volume  2 - September 22, 2017

Important Information
We began our math curriculum this week. We looked at place value, and noticed how each place is 10x more than the previous one. Students used expanded form to take numbers apart by place value. Our class worked very hard to learn about rounding to all different place values within a number.	Start working on those multiplication facts at home. Games, online, or just some simple back and forth while driving in the car. All it takes is about 10 minutes each day. We try to play multiplication games in class a couple of times a week. If you would like to borrow some games to play at home, I am happy to check them out!	In writing we have started our fiction narrative. Students are writing stories using ideas from their lives. We ended the week by getting to know our characters and their external and internal traits. Everyone just wants to start in on their story!! But we are trying be like real writers and plan before we start.

This week in class we...

Continue to enjoy the game of Sparkle -counting by groups like 9s to help us get more fluent at multiplication. Made a paper blog and decorated it to practice posting. Next week we will discuss comments Signed on to the chromebooks. Everyone has their school email address and has signed on to the Google classroom. Parents were also invited to the Google classroom. Made a flipgrid about what we are looking forward to in math and what we are nervous about. You can watch it on the google classroom.

Parent Connection

Specific questions you can ask your child about what we are learning this week: Multiplication tables - for most kids the 9’s. Can you count by 9? Backwards and forwards? What is your blog name? Can you read this number? 1,346,798  We are reading numbers up to one million and taking them apart by place value. Give your student some large numbers to write down for you.

Newsletter for our first two weeks

Please click this link to see our newsletter for theSept. 15.

https://docs.google.com/a/glendale.k12.wi.us/document/d/1JSjlHXd4IsCEm9Jz-TrLr2XIi9h4QTuIc53IlRJzJP0/edit?usp=sharing

Click'd by Tamara Ireland Stone

Allie designs an app at code camp to help people find friends. It sounds great and everyone is excited about it. But does liking the same kind of cookie, or vacation spot really mean you should be friends? This book looks at friendship and brings up questions that students will really relate to. I like the use of profile pictures in the book and I think kids will too. I think many 4th grade studnets and older would really enjoy this book. Check it out!

Connecting with Educators

I have tried for the past few years to attend the ISTE convention. ISTE stands for International Society for Technology in Education. This year the convention was held in San Antonio and once again I was unable to find the funds to attend. However, this time I discovered (thru Twitter) a wonderful alternative -the Google #notatISTE17 group. 

 I have spent the last three days connecting with educators who are also NOT at ISTE this year and it has been quite a learning experience. Connecting with the #notatISTE17 group has pushed me to reach a bit beyond my comfort zone in a few areas. I played around in Google Draw and created my own notatISTE17 badge and ribbons. I have played with Google Draw before, but I learned a few more techniques. The challenge/Leader Board pushed me to connect and reach out with different forms of social media. Trying to gain more points for the challenges, I found myself watching a few Periscope shares from ISTE17 and posting my picture on Twitter asking for selfies from attendees at ISTE (yikes!). Also, I am finally transforming my classroom blog over into one where I am blogging about my own teaching/learning journey thanks to challenges from the #notatISTE17 group (thank you!).

I was unable to attend ISTE this year, but thanks to Twitter, I connected to a fabulous group of educators and walked away with great resources and new ideas. (Ok, no swag, but I am holding out hope for a really great door prize!)