Going into Fourth Grade

The school year is almost complete and summer is just around the corner. Your students won’t have to see the inside of a classroom for a couple of months. Unfortunately, 8 weeks without practice is a long time, especially for struggling readers. Often students forget some of what they've learned over the past school year during the summer months. 

Top education experts have a few tips for teachers and parents to help their students avoid the summer brain drain and make warm weather reading easy and a lot of fun!

• Explore your local library. Find out when it is open and how to get a library card. Many libraries even have free summer programs and offer online books. 

• Encourage your student to read at least four to six books over the summer break. Research shows that reading just six books during the summer may keep a struggling reader from regressing. Make sure the material is age appropriate and match the child's interest and abilities.  Libraries often run summer reading programs that motivate kids to read, so find out what's available in your area. 

• Read daily. Encourage your child to read something every day. Parents can help identify opportunities such as the newspaper, a magazine, TV guide, recipes, arts and crafts book, read to a sibling or friend, share a comic strip, while out in the car select a billboard or ad, even a license plate. You don't have to search far. The opportunities to read are endless. 

• Make it fun. Encourage parents, of students ages 5-12, to get involved in the The Scholastic Summer Challenge. It’s a free global reading program aimed at encouraging students to read throughout the summer months. Kids read books, log their minutes, and earn virtual rewards all summer Active Bodies, Active Minds.

• Activity Packs- Suggest grade level activity books or packs. These are great on the road or for parents to enforces each day to keep kids from doing more than just playing video games.  

As a third grade teacher, I have created a pack for students who were in third grade and moving to fourth grade. The summer to fourth pack includes 122 pages of skills and concepts for both math and language. 

Language Arts Pack only CLICK HERE

Math Pack CLICK HERE

Math and L.A. pack CLICK HERE

Keep your learners engaged: End of the year!

Home Stretch teachers! You can do this! It's time to pull out some tricks because the end is drawing close and engaging your students is in its toughest season of the school year. Here are tips and ideas for engaging students at the end of the year.

1. Keep the Routine

Students will behave their best if you stick with what you started with. For me, that means I start my day with spelling and end it with Bible (I teach in a private school). My students have been trained in this schedule all year and it works best to keep it the same.

We end with Bible Lesson

Keep working with routines

2. Add in some technology

You may decide to keep your schedule, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun! This time of year is a great time to do some projects together. My class used Flipgrid to share their research with each other. They were able to collaborate by commenting through video on each other's projects.
More about that HERE in my 7 ways to present digitally in the classroom.

LINK to resource

3. Increate Movement

The weather warms up and cools down to rain. They are either hyper from the awesome weather or cooped up from too many indoor recesses. This is the perfect time to use "brain breaks" or "Go Noodle"

4. Book Clubs

My students LOVE book clubs and they are strategically placed at the end of the year. They are a fun way to keep kids reading. It also helps motivate them to find books they love before summer.

5. Fun Behavior Incentives

How about switching up your behavior incentive? One thing I love doing is selecting a student name and placing it in a special place. I tell my students that I have selected a name for the day. If that student behaves well, then they are rewarded with x,y, or z. If not, they will never know who it was and their name goes back in the pile for another turn on another day.

6. STEM activities

These activities are fun too! Get their brains thinking about science, technology engineering, and math. This is a good opportunity for collaboration as well.

Link to resource HERE

Easter Stem Challenges

Bring Stem fun into your Easter Celebrations this year! It is super easy and will give your students a holiday challenge to remember. Choose from three different STEM challenges including: Plastic Egg Races, Launching Peeps, and Building a home for Chick.

  

Other Activities to stimulate thinking include a writing craftivity, graphing Jelly Beans, and Crack the Code with a riddle. 

 Learn more about this product HERE!

TO Purchase click HERE

7 Ways to Present Digitally in the Classroom

1.Book Talks/Reading Fluency- Great way to increase student’s reading engagement and improve books choices as well as encouraging them to read aloud. 

2.New Learning- Explaining how to use strategies can give you a quick formative assessment or help others learn who do not quite get it yet. This can happen on platforms such as flipgrid (see post here), boomlearning (see post here), google classroom, or seesaw

3.Classroom Community- It can be used for more than just academic purposes. You can send home get well messages or happy birthday notes.

4.Stem Demonstrations- Great way to share hard work since many design projects are hard to talk home.

5.Writing Celebrations- Fun way to celebrate the hard work that was put into a piece of writing.

6.Social Learning- Have kids present something they have learned using the “Sticky Situation” discussion script. This will empower others to make better choices.

Click HERE

7.Goal Setting- Celebrate academic achievement by explaining an accomplished goal and encourage others to achieve this goal by offering advice.

CLICK HERE if you want to see more