Mr. McGaughey’s Grade 4

January Newsletter

Please visit our new class website regularly at
http://par.scdsb.on.ca/classes/mcgaughey

New on the Website: How to make a Towel Print, The Twelve Days of
Christmas Rewritten, Book Fair Posters.

As the year progresses I will continue to post reminders, classroom
news, and examples of student work on our class web page.

Reminder: January 17: 6:30 pm- Parkview School. There is an information
meeting for parents of students interesting in applying for grade 5
Extended French. EFSL Registration will be January 20-25 in the school
office.

Camp Kitchi: Dates and fees for Camp Kitchi are now being arranged.
Watch for more information about Camp Kitchi over the next few weeks.

Units this Month:

Science: We are continuing our unit on Properties of Light and Sound.

Language Arts, Math, Social Studies, Art

For four afternoons in January, the entire junior division will
participate in an integrated unit on the Winter Olympics.

Math: Measurement: Nelson Math 4 Chapter 5

Over the next 3 weeks, your child will be investigating linear and time
measurement.

There will be opportunities to measure, to choose appropriate
measurement units, and to relate measurement units to each other. The
metric unit decimetre will be introduced.

Measurement Activities you can do at home:

• Your child can look around the home and find objects that could be
measured in decimetres. An appropriate activity would be to first
estimate the measurement in

decimetres and then compare their answer to the measured one. Your child
can then change the decimetre measurements to centimetres.

• Using a household ruler, your child could practice measuring and
record findings using millimetres, centimetres, and decimetres. It is
important for children to practice measuring accurately using tools such
as rulers.

• At home, you and your child can look for opportunities to measure how
long certain activities take to complete in hours and minutes, such as
completing homework, watching a video, or getting ready for bed.

Reading clock faces to measure the length of time certain activities
take will help your child build confidence in reading,

reporting, and measuring time.

Monday January 23 (Tentative): Math Quiz on Measurement: chapter 5

Chapter 7: 2D Geometry:

At the end of January through the beginning of February, your child will
be studying geometry, a very important strand of mathematics. Your child
will have many opportunities to explore geometric concepts using
concrete materials, think about the design of objects in the world
around, and create designs. At this time, your child will be focusing on
2-D shapes. Your child will explore 3-D shapes later this year.

At home, your child can:

• You and your child might enjoy using the concept of similarity to
enlarge drawings of cartoon characters. Draw a grid over the image, and
then, on a piece of paper, draw the same grid, but with larger squares.
Copy the shapes in the grid squares on the original onto the squares of
the larger grid.

• You might play a simple card game to help your child identify shapes
by name, as follows: make 20 cards showing names or drawings of
quadrilaterals, 4 each of parallelogram, rhombus, trapezoid, square, and
rectangle. Shuffle the cards. Then each player draws 4 cards. On a turn,
a player can discard 1 card and pick 1 new card. The first player with 4
cards in 1 category (all are trapezoids, or

parallelograms, and so on) wins.

• Your child might use drinking straws, cut to different lengths, to
explore the different shapes they can make with different side lengths.
They could also draw the shapes they create.

• You might help your child look for pictures in magazines that model
symmetry.

You may also want to visit the Nelson Web site at www.mathk8.nelson.com
for more suggestions to help your child with these units.

Speeches:

It is traditional in our school for all students from grade 4-8 to
prepare speeches to present in front of the class. We will choose a few
students from the class to present their speeches at an assembly in the
gym. Some of these students will be chosen to represent our school at
the area public speaking competitions.

Your children will be working on their speeches in class for the next
two weeks. They may sometimes bring speech home to practice.
Presentations in our class will be on the week of January 31- February
3. The school presentation will be on the following week.

Sean McGaughey

Parkview School Phone #526-2091