Curriculum Newsletter January 8, 2024

Happy New Year!

 Seeking Family Volunteers: We are seeking 4th grade family volunteers to organize and fundraise for a 4th grade celebration/field trip for the end of the year.  Third grade families are welcome to come and support this, as we will need your help next year.Our hope is that a group of families can start to organize a manageable field trip and celebration that can be carried on from year to year.  If you are interested in working on this important project, please contact your child’s classroom teacher via email. Thank you for considering.

Clothing for school:  Please be sure that your child has appropriate clothing and extras in case they get wet.  Also, please be sure that your child has boots AND indoor shoes when they come to school.  When students have only boots, it makes the rugs wet and we sit on the rugs throughout the day.

Rescheduled Writing Celebration: Please join us on the morning of January 10th for our rescheduled writing celebration between 7:50 and 8:15. Students are excited to share their writing with you. 

Lunch Menu: You can access the January UCS menu by clicking here. 

SNOW MOTION DATES:

If you are interested in volunteering for Snow Motion, here are the dates that the ¾ classes will be skiing and boarding at Cochran’s this year:

2/1, 2/8, 2/15, and 2/22 from 11-12.

Living Wax Museum: As part of our nonfiction reading and writing unit, students are going to be completing a research project about an important person in history. We will be transforming areas of our school into a living wax museum from 8:15-9:15 on Wednesday, February 21st and we would love if you could join us. Also, we will be introducing this project to students tomorrow (Tuesday, January 9th). It would be great if you could help your child brainstorm ideas about which person they would like to research. If your family has a famous ancestor, this could be a great opportunity to learn about more about that person and share!

Curriculum Updates

• Third Grade Math: Third graders started a new short unit. This unit focuses on understanding and finding perimeter and area using standard units of measurement, and on classifying 2-D figures. Students use standard measurement tools to measure the length of objects and the distance around 2-dimensional figures (perimeter). They use square units to measure the amount of space a given object covers (area). Students build on work connecting arrays and multiplication, and find area by multiplying length and width. They also recognize area as additive: a shape can be composed and its area found by adding the areas of the parts. Students look at rectangles that have the same area and different perimeters, and the same perimeter and different areas. Students also identify attributes of triangles and quadrilaterals, and explore different categories of quadrilaterals.
  

• Fourth Grade Math:  Fourth graders are working on  understanding the meaning of addition and subtraction, understanding the base-10 number system with numbers to 1,000,000, and adding and subtracting multi digit numbers fluently, including with the U.S. standard algorithms.Check out this letter that includes samples of the types of math that we’ll be exploring if you are interested in more details. Click Here.

• Reading: We are beginning a new unit on nonfiction books.  Students will be learning about text features that support nonfiction and how to find the main idea and supporting details in a text.  We will also be focusing on biographies, as part of a Wax Museum project.

• Writing:  Students have been creating Green-Up Vermont posters to encourage participation in Green-Up Day on May 4th. Students are encouraged to submit their artwork into the Green-Up Vermont contest. If you don’t want your child’s work to be submitted, please let me know. 

• Social Studies: Third and Fourth graders have begun a unit on Physical Geography. This week we explored political, physical, and topographical maps of Vermont and the United  States.  We looked at different types of maps and looked at similarities and differences of different maps of Vermont and the United States.

Making Bags out of T-shirts with Recycle Rhonda!