• A Weekly Reflection is coming home today. Please check it out to learn about your child's proud moments and goal for next week, sign, and return on Monday.
• Crestwood Fun Fair is tomorrow, 11 am - 3 pm!  The weather forecast looks beautiful, and it should be a fun time for all. PTO is still in need of volunteers for the second half of the fair. Sign up here if you can help out!
• We will have our first Flyer Family time and early release next Wednesday. Students will meet with their same Family from last year. New faces will include new staff members, Kindergarten students, and any new students to Crestwood. Students should wear their Flyer Family shirts on this day. We will learn and practice Habit #1: Be Proactive. Being proactive means "I am in charge of my feelings and behavior."

Monday, September 14

Our first spelling list will come home this day, test 9/24

Tuesday, September 15

Wednesday, September 16

Flyer Families, wear t-shirts

Early Release @ 1:40 pm

Thursday, September 17

Dad's Club meets at Smugala's @ 7:30 pm, all Crestwood dads are welcome!

Friday, September 18

Math

Mrs. Farhatt helps students to challenge with place value and multiplication after finishing an assignment.  

Ivy and Aniya work together to round large numbers to a given place.  

CJ watches Madison write expanded form for a standard number he created.  

Writer's Workshop
We started learning about Realistic Fiction, our first unit of study for the school year.  Students learned the special characteristics of this genre and brainstormed seed ideas for their stories.  We also spent time creating a summary and developing our main characters.

Parker shares an idea for her story with the class.  

Reader's Workshop

We continued building our reading stamina this week, and we explored the different types of thinking readers do.  Thoughtful readers have reactions, make connections, ask questions, and share predictions.  

Autumn & Jayden record their thinking in their Reading Journals.  

We are leaders!

Math
In Math this week, we learned about the place of digits and the value each holds.  We practiced writing numbers in three forms:  standard, word, and expanded.  We compared and ordered numbers, thinking about which are greater, less, and equal.  We finished the week by learning some steps to round numbers.

Writer's Workshop
Students continued generating ideas in our Writer's Notebooks this week.  We'll use these ideas from our own lives in our upcoming Realistic Fiction unit.



Students created personal maps of their bedrooms, homes, neighborhoods, or schools and recorded memories from different locations.


We also created memory chains, listing ideas about given topics.

Reader's Workshop
Students learned to ask the important question, "Am I comprehending?" One strategy we tried was using our reading journals to write about each of these

• Who is in the story? What is happening? Where is this taking place?
• What am I picturing in my mind?
• What am I feeling?

Answering these questions helps us to gauge if we are comprehending.  If we struggle with a question, rereading will save the day! 

Social Studies

We studied geography (our earth)!  Kids learned songs to help them remember the 7 continents and 5 oceans.  Students also drew and labeled their own model Earth, which included lines of latitude and longitude, the equator, prime meridian, and a compass rose.  

Writer's Workshop

This week was all about getting our Writer's Notebooks started and generating ideas.  We listed all of the things we can do in our W.N.: draft stories, make lists, create songs, sketch ideas, brainstorm, and more.  We also created heart maps, a place to write down all of the things we love.  We created maps of our backyards and homes and listed experiences we've had there.  We'll use these pages throughout the year whenever we need an idea for a writing piece.  

Iqra shares part of "The Girl with the Red Eyes" with Scarlet.  

Haylee reads part of her writing homework to Ivy & Parker.  

Matthew & Brenden reflect on their Writing homework.  

Math

This week, we reviewed place and value.  Students practiced identifying the place or name of each digit (ones, tens, hundreds, and so on) and telling the value or how much it's worth (6, 60, 600, and so on).  Kids also learned about the three forms of numbers: standard, word, and expanded form.  

Madison, Scarlet, and Sanni practice writing numbers in expanded form. 

Reader's Workshop 

We explored our classroom library and chose some books to fill our book boxes.  Students made notes about several different genres including informational text, poetry, fantasy fiction, and more. The class also accepted the 30 Book Challenge!  This challenge requires kids to spend time reading a variety of genres and keep a list of books they complete as the year progresses.  

Our Class Mission Statement!  Students brainstormed answers to the following questions:

• Why did we come to fourth grade?
• What do we want to learn about this year?
• How should our classmates and classroom look and sound?
• How do we want to make each other feel?

Their answers were heartfelt and powerful.  Our Mission Statement is a summary of student responses, and to seal the deal, we signed our names promising to do our best in completing our mission.  

Ivy & Katelyn discuss their favorite books.

Iqra & Haylee talk about the genres they like to read.  

Matthew & Madison share their goals for reading this school year.  

Christian & Monissa read over each other's reading surveys.  

Parker & Sanni take turns talking about their reading lives.  

Autumn, Brenden, & Aniya talk about books they've read over the summer. 

Writer's Workshop

     We've embarked on a Poetry Unit and learned so many new things! We learned that poetry can have so many different features including rhyming, stanzas, and line breaks.  Poems can have similes, metaphors, personification, and idioms.  Poets make interesting and intentional choices about punctuation and capitalization, and poetry often invokes emotion.  We learned that an anthology is a collection of poems on the same topic, and as a class we wrote a Vacation Anthology. Students are currently in the process of writing their own anthology on the topic of their choice.  

We studied and annotated famous works of poetry.  

Anna wrote a poem that shows the suspense (and disappointment) going fishing can bring.