"The Best Christmas Pageant Ever"

In the true spirit of Christmas, the fourth grade classes are reading "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever," by Barbara Robinson. We are studying descriptive passages and analyzing character traits. Each student will be creating his own voki, which is an avatar character with the student's voice attached, to represent one of the characters from the book. You can check out our progress on a wiki that we have created for this unit at http://bgs4christmas.wikispaces.com/
The following is the list of spelling words for this week. These are all vocabulary words taken from the story.
1. cussed
2. clonked
3. bobcat
4. volunteer
5. potluck
6. primary
7. tradition
8. manger
9. shepherd
10. insane
11. sprouted
12. minister
13. rowdy
14. sly
15. stable
16. outlaws
17. uproar
18. crooks
19. spotlight
20. retire
Challenge words:
21. ornaments
22. audience
23. villain
24. honor
25. snitching

Electricity Unit

This week we have started a new unit in science involving electricity. It is a follow-up unit to the magnetism activities we did last week. This week your student will be learning about static electricity, comparing charges to magnets, and exploring the creation of circuits. Ask your students how the poles on magnets are the same as electrical charges. These are some of the vocabulary terms we have been using: positive, negative, neutral, electrons, protons, neutrons, attract, repel.