Please take a moment to check your scheduled parent-teacher conference time.  You can access it through the link on the left sidebar of this page.  In order to protect student privacy, the page is password protected.  I’ve sent home a letter confirming our scheduled time, and the password for the page is at the bottom of the letter.  I update the schedule whenever someone requests a change, so please email me if you want one of the free time slots and I’ll make the adjustments to the schedule.  PLEASE, if you have an appointment scheduled midday or mid-evening, consider moving to one of the open blocks on Thursday (if you’re able to do so) so I can squeeze in a buffer slot in the event that I get backed up.  Thank you!

Good afternoon, families!  I hope everything is settling back to normal after the unexpected “vacation” from school.  I am working to catch up on some website updates, and I expect to soon post updates about our start to Guided Reading instruction, the conclusion of DRAs, parent-teacher conferences and report cards, and other key items of news.  Stay tuned!  In the mean time, there are two posts below this one to help you with some of our activities this week.  Enjoy!

Here’s a quick guide to the three kids of subjects and predicates we’re working on in school!

Subject Who or what the sentence is about.  (Ex:  The blue ball rolled down the driveway.)

Predicate What happens to the subject.  (Ex:  The blue ball rolled down the driveway.)

Simple Subject Just the noun that makes up the subject.  (Ex:  The blue ball rolled down the driveway.)

Complete Subject All the words that show who or what the sentence is about.  (Ex:  The blue ball rolled down the driveway.)

Compound Subject A subject that has two or more people or things.  (Ex:  The blue ball and red baseball bat rolled down the driveway.)

Simple Predicate The verb that shows what the subject does.  (Ex:  The blue ball rolled down the driveway.)

Complete Predicate All the words that show what the subject did.  (Ex:  The blue ball rolled down the driveway.)

Compound Predicate The words that show multiple things that the subject did.  (Ex:  The blue ball rolled down the driveway and hit a passing car.)

Before the freak October snowstorm, we administered an addition and subtraction screening to the students to measure kids’ performance on these core skills.  Several kids had a tough time with the subtraction piece, and while I’ve spoken with those parents directly, I thought all parents might appreciate a quick explanation of the different kids of subtraction problems that we expect kids to master in fourth grade.  The list, as well as an explanatory video, is below:

1. Subtraction without borrowing – the easy stuff!
2. Simple borrowing – only one place value needs to have borrowing take place
3. Compound borrowing – multiple place values need to have borrowing
4. Subtracting across the zero – You cannot borrow from a 0, so you must move over one place value.
5. Subtracting across two zeroes – Same idea, but a bit more complex.

The sad part: I made a mistake on the FIRST problem. Oops! Yes, I know 3-1=2, not 1.