Newsletter for Ms. Long’s Fabulous 3rd&4th Grade!
Howdy and Happy New Year!
Hope everyone had joyous holidays, good family time, and lots of refreshing rest! December was a terrific month in which your children demonstrated caring to each other, great attitudes towards learning and commitment to their studies, as evidenced in mid-year testing scores. What a terrific way to start the new year!
Here’s what we’ll be studying this month:
Language
Reading: This month our stories will tie in strongly to science, with an emphasis on the scientific method. Although we’ll continue to work hard on reading with fluency, and expression, we will focus on comprehension.
Writing: Since the class has made such progress in capitalization and punctuation, we will keep up our good work in those areas while expanding to grammar and advanced sentence structure. Our class loves to write descriptively, showing detail and humor. We’ll focus now on persuasive and informative writing.

Math
We’re continuing to solve word problems, choosing the logical operation for each problem, rather than just strict calculation. This is still the area of greatest challenge for most students. Calculation, however, has come with ease. The kids have worked VERY hard on multi-digit multiplication and division, and love to dazzle me with “GINORMOUS” numbers in their problems.  You can definitely practice this at home using any problems you come up with, as well as multiplication flash cards, just to get the times facts automatic and division steps cemented. All of our math is based on knowing multiplication and division, so proficiency is important.

Science
Energy and magnetism will continue to be our focus. We will be tracing the steps involved in basic circuits.

Social Studies
We will utilize reading comprehension and writing skills as we practice extracting and summarizing information on 20th century history.

Thank you for your communication! Email is always the best way to reach me. Please email me during the school week at llong@sage-academy.org.