4th Grade completed their Snow Cinquains and altered snowflakes and these are now shared on the Travel Scrapbook on our wiki. I hope you will take a minute to check these out. They did a great job with the snowflakes and their poetry.

4th Grade also completed the February and March Voices of the World activities. February’s activity was to illustrate and say the months of the year and March’s activity was to illustrate the various locations of the schools participating and say the name of the state and/or country. These are now shared on our Voices of the World page on our wiki. If you haven’t, I would encourage you to visit the Voices of the World Wiki and check out all of the voices participating in this project – it really is amazing!

4th Grade is currently in the middle of a 12 Class Keyboarding Boot Camp. This involves taking a timed test at the beginning of class, completing keyboarding lessons in Mavis Beacon and playing some typing games. These classes are meant to teach proper technique and not to concentrate too much on speed. If your child memorizes the keyboard and learns the correct technique for keyboarding, speed will come. I would encourage you to encourage your child to practice keyboarding at home. As with anything, the more you practice, the better you get. Here are some keyboarding lesson sites they could use at home:

• TypingWeb.com – Lessons, Graphs to track progress, typing games. This site requires registration and can be ad free for a $5 one-time donation. You can customize the look of your background and some other features.
• GoodTyping.com – 27 lessons. This site requires registration.
• FreeTypingGame.net – This site has lessons, games & speed tests. We often use this site in class to test speed.
• PowerTyping – Simple typing lessons where you can type to music to encourage rhythmic typing. Records your WPM on each lesson and assigns a grade.
• Sense-Lang – A simple site with lessons starting with the home row. This site also allows you to paste text from anywhere and practice typing using that text. This is a nice feature since it practices real typing rather than just random words or letter combinations.
• NimbleFingers – This site has online typing tests and a typing program you can download called Word Wacker. This is a free to try program.
• E-Learning For Kids – A fun animated course.
• Dance Mat Typing – Fun Characters and songs to introduce Touch Typing for children 7-11 years old from the BBC.