CONTACTING ME: You may contact me by calling the middle school or by email. lblowers@hamiltonschools.us If we need to talk at length on the phone, I will generally call after school or in the evening. My cell is a 231 area code so if you see that, it could be me.

CONTACTING ME: You may contact me by calling the middle school or by email. lblowers@hamiltonschools.us  If we need to talk at length on the phone, I will generally call after school or in the evening. My cell is a 231 area code so if you see that, it could be me. 

SNACKS: Please send a snack with your child each day. Many students are not bringing one with them and 3-4 hours since breakfast is a long time! 

SPIRIT WEEK! Next week is spirit week: here is the schedule:

Monday:  WEAR YOUR "BE THE GOOD" T-SHIRTS

Tuesday:  COLOR DAY- Wear your 4th Grade Track & Field shirt- if you are from another school, wear a shirt from there. OR you can wear RED that day.       

Wednesday: WACKY WEDNESDAY- wear mismatched clothing.

Thursday: Sports Teams- Wear clothing from your favorite team of any sport.

Friday: HAWKEYE DAY!

CAMP MANITOU-LIN - We had a great day! Everyone was pretty tired by the time we left. I have pictures in the photos Tab.

JRT - Just Right Time (This is like RTI)

JRT begins next week. Monday/Thursday is Reading JRT and Tuesday/Friday is Math. Students have been assigned teachers based on need in reading and math and will be going to class with those teachers after lunch from 11:25-12:00.

HOMEWORK:
Math: "Remembering 1-7"  #'s 9-15 and 19-21 only
Social Studies: 3 Branches Quiz on Tuesday

Reading a minimum of 20 minutes each day is always Homework
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 MATH:   
  This week we continued to practice adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators. We added in adding and subtracting mixed numbers. We will practice adding and subtracting fractions fractions requiring renaming this coming week.
  We continue reviewing parts of a fraction, fraction as division, converting improper fractions to mixed numbers and visa versa, how to find the Greatest Common Factor of two denominators in order to simplify a fraction, and how to to find the Least Common Multiple in order to make a common denominator. We have been drawing pictures, looking at interactive visuals, and discussing situations where we would use fractions in order to connect the fractions to what it looks like and uses.
  You can find tutorials in the MATH Tab under where it says "Current Unit".
LANGUAGE ARTS 
Writing: We have discussed what a complete sentence and sentence fragment are. We have also discussed parts of a paragraph and used our experience at Camp Manitou-Lin to write a paragraph with a topic sentence, details, and closing sentence. Next week will finish. We will do caption writing in order to practice Google Docs. features, sentence structure, and meaningful punctuation.

READING:

We have been learning about/practicing strategies for finding the Main Idea and details, using context clues to discover vocabulary meaning, and background knowledge and text features to help with comprehension. Next week we will continue practicing by working in pairs reading nonfiction. 
SCIENCE  
We are investigating motion by working in groups to design an obstacle course that will cause a marble to go the SLOWEST possible from one of the table to the other. Kids are designing, testing, discussing problems and redesigning. We will have a competition next week.

Social Studies:

Mrs. Custer teaches this and I will put her information on the blog each week when she gives it to me.  

Word Study

We took the Lesson 2 test Friday. These will come home on Monday. Our next skill is irregular verbs. The word list is in the SPELLING Tab.