Happy New Year!

May this new year bring many opportunities your way to explore every joy of life. May your resolutions for the days ahead stay firm turning all your dreams into reality and all your efforts into great achievements.

~ Anonymous

Wishing all of you a wonderful and safe New Year!

~Mrs. Cassidy

This week we will discuss text and graphic features. The students will analyze nonfiction text to determine why authors use a variety of graphic features, Hurricanes: Earth's Mightiest Storms is an introduction to the power, majesty, and destruction of hurricanes. It contains eyewitness accounts of the storms, scientific facts about all types of hurricanes, and full-color photographs. 

 

The students will wrap up their unit on early colonization this week. After taking notes on Plymouth Colony, the students will face the challenge of developing their own Mayflower Compacts, however the scenario is slightly different. The year is 2020, and the American spaceship Mayflower II has landed on Mars, exactly 400 years after the first Mayflower reached the New World. The mission of this voyage is to construct a research base on Mars for scientific observations and experiments. Unfortunately, due to a malfunction, the Mayflower II crash-landed in an area outside that designated for U.S. exploration by a United Nations treaty. This territory is not within the jurisdiction of any Earth nation. After discovering several other obstacles, the students will work with a team to create a compact for their new form of government. I am looking forward to listening to their conversations and debates.

 

Holiday Giving Opportunity

          In the spirit of giving, the Campus School students will be collecting items December 8^th – December 12^th for Moriah House and the Mid-South Food Bank.  Moriah House is Memphis Union Mission’s safe house for women and their children.  The Mid-South Food Bank fights hunger by efficiently collecting and distributing wholesome food, while educating the community about the problem of hunger and advocating on behalf of hungry people. In our tough economic times, these organizations need our help more than ever.  Campus School families can help by donating the following items.

Monday: Paper Products 

·                  toilet paper

·                  paper towels

·                  Kleenex-regular and purse size

·                  diapers

·                  paper plates/napkins

Tuesday: Toiletry Items

·                  baby wipes

·                  toothpaste/toothbrushes

·                  soap/deodorant

·                  bath/shower gel

·                  lotion – adult and baby

Wednesday: Cleaning Products

·                  dish washing detergent

·                  laundry detergent

·                  Clorox wipes

Thursday: School Supplies       

·                  notebooks

·                  highlighters

·                  pens/crayons/markers                                                                                      

·                  paper

This week the students will learn about the first colonies set up in the Americas. We will begin our journey with the story of Roanoke. The students will be responsible for summarizing the events at Roanoke as well as developing their own theory as to what happened at the mysterious colony. Later in the week, the students will learn about Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony.

 

Wishing you all a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. 

No school November 26-28

Weekly Happenings

The students are continuing their work with Main Idea and Details as well as Verb Tenses while reading our current novel study, Graveyard Girl. The students are also currently working in their Elmwood writing in which they have become a docent at Elmwood and must take their reader on a tour of the historic grounds using the notes they took at our Being There Experience. They are all really engaged in this writing assignment! I am looking forward to seeing the final products soon!

Check out the Flocabulary video below to review the rap song we listened to in class!
Main Idea Rap

 

We will continue reading our current novel, Graveyard Girl, this week while focusing on main idea and details. The students will be exposed to a variety of different text (narrative and nonfiction) as we discover how to analyze and identify the main idea. 

Graveyard Girl

The students are currently working on tracing the routes of major explorers. Immediately following the explorer project the students will begin reading Graveyard Girl. There is more to come on this riveting novel that ties standard driven reading skills with the historic culture of Memphis. Updates on vocabulary words will come as soon as the explorer route project is completed (eta: Monday evening). If you have not read this novel or experienced the wonder of Elmwood Cemetery, you are definitely in for a treat!

 

This week the students will learn about the early explorers of America. Some famous explorers to be discussed include Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Henry Hudson. The students will be able to identify explorers and trace the routes of their expeditions. 

Welcome Back

 Welcome back to the second quarter of fourth grade!!! I am looking forward to seeing the students and hearing all about their Fall Break experiences. This week the students will begin reading Invasion from Mars by Henry Koch. This is a fun and engaging play with an interesting history that impacted America in the 1930's. We will discuss the differences between performances and written stories as well as focus on story structure. In addition, the students will also use the 6 Trait writing skill, Ideas, to write a fictional newspaper article.

It was a chilly October 30, 1938, the night before Halloween. By night's end, much of the populace in America was filled with fear and paranoia. Their reason was that the heard on the radio that the country was being invaded by extra-terrestrials from the planet Mars. What they were really hearing was a radio play performed by the Mercury Theater on the Air, directed by Orson Welles, on CBS. It was a radio adaptation of the science fiction novel The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The effects of this dramatization showed many things. First, how powerful and influential the electronic media can be. Second, how current conditions in society can foster this type of hysteria. And finally, how these events could present future events in elaborate speculative.