Mr. Blanc's Class

What a great experience today at the Oregon State Capitol Building! Have your child tell you all about meeting Governor Brown and seeing the Senate and House chambers. Enjoy the pics!

Math 4th grade was hit pretty hard this week with the flu, so we decided to move the mid unit assessment back to Monday, 2/25. Students can play Prodigy to practice their fraction skills at home. Reading From this point forward each time a group finishes a book, the members will make a book report. The students get to choose how they want to display knowledge of their book, so far some of the ways students have selected to share their knowledge include making a video, making a timeline of the story, making a poster, and making a diorama. Time will be given in class, but if a students wants to work on it at home they can. Have your student tell you what they plan on doing for their book report.  Idiom of the week: see eye to eye How We Organize Ourselves Next week our class will be turned into the legislative branch of the Oregon state government. The students will be divided into State Senators and State Representatives. Each child will be placed on a committee that wi...

No School Monday There will be no school on Monday, 2/18 in observance of Presidents Day. Math Next week we will continue working on adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators. They will be solving story problems. In order to be proficient they will need to show all of their work and create visual representations. We will take a mid unit assessment on Friday, 2/22 to see how we are doing as a class. Reading We are going strong in our book groups. Every group has finished at least 1 book so far! Have your child tell you about the book they are reading. Ask they what the problem in the story is. Idiom of the week: in the doghouse  How We Organize Ourselves Students have completed the case study of the Oregon Bottle Bill. Now they will begin brainstorming a problem they see in the world and come up with a law they believe would help solve the problem. Once they have come up with their law, they will write a persuasive paper to convince others why the law sh...

Reading Check in with your student regarding their book group book. A few groups are on their second book already, and the rest will finish their first book next week. Have your student tell you about the main character. Make sure they use evidence from the text to support their thinking.  Idiom of the week: Leave the door open Math This week students started using benchmark fractions like 0, 1/2, and 1 whole to help them compare two fractions. For example, they would explain that 3/4 is larger than 2/5 because they know that 3/4 is larger than 1/2 and 2/5 is less than 1/2. Next week they will continue comparing fractions and begin adding fractions with like denominators by the end of the week.    How We Organize Ourselves Our how we organize ourselves inquiry with the central idea that community values influence leaders and impact decision making will be entering its third week. Students have learned about the way power is shared by the three branches of gov...

Reading Each child has been placed in a book group. As a group they selected a book they all want to read. They also decided how many pages they will read each day. Starting Monday they will be responsible for reading their daily book group pages before they do any other reading in class. Ask your child which book they selected and how many pages they need to read each day.  Idiom of the week: in hot water Writing Persuasive writing will be our next genre. On Monday, students will write an on demand piece to give me an idea of their current abilities in persuasive writing. Then we will begin working on mini-lessons to improve our argument writing. Inquiry Our how we organize ourselves inquiry with the central idea that c ommunity values influence leaders and impact decision making will focus on the three branches of our state government. The vocabulary words for the week are government related, so students will have a chance to get very comfortable with terminology in...