Week of October 22nd

Updates and announcements:

• The data test is corrected, I'll pass it back on Monday for you to review. Please sign and send back to school with your child.
• The rocks and minerals test will be this Monday. Students need to study at least one time between now and Monday. Please have the students bring back all their science papers and their study log on Monday.
• Thank you so much to the parents who submitted book orders, it's a great way for our class to earn books! I'll submit orders on October 29th, so feel free to order if you are interested.
• I will be out of the classroom on Friday, November 2nd as I will be at a district wide professional development.
• Have a safe and fun Halloween!

Buddies:

Our class got together with our buddy class (Mrs. Sharpe's class) to help them make geometry monsters. 

Math
Written by: Tyler, Hallie, Paris, Shane, Parsa, Liam

• We worked with partners to review for our data test.
• We also worked on data on IXL (strands J6 and J7).
• The data test was Tuesday.
• We reviewed telling time then practiced time with partners.
• We learned about elapsed time and practiced with elapsed time problems.

Science
Written by: Brien, Cassidy, Sophie, James,

• We reviewed rocks and minerals in science and we took notes on a book called Rocks and Minerals that we read.
• We made a study guide together as a class.
• We also made rock flashcards.
• We finished taking notes on our rocks and minerals book.
• We did rocks and minerals jeopardy to review.

Writing
Written by: Tommy, Annie, Jack C., Derek, Kaitlyn

• We started to revise our stories and learned how to use the checklist.

• We learned how to revise thought shots, dialogue, and sensory details.

• We learned how to use the editing checklist and spent time editing our stories

• We started to publish our stories today.

Reading
Written by: JackF, Amy, Keith, and Brenna

• We reviewed what inferring is and we read the book Hurricane.
• We reread the story Hurricane and did some inferring to see how we knew there was a storm without the book telling us.
• We read Sammy and the Time Of Troubles, and we inferred in that too. We used the text and our schema to make inferences.
• We talked about taking small details from the story to grow ideas about our character.
• We talked about how to grow theories about characters in our books by looking at their actions and choices they make.

Science Test

Hello Parents!
The class will have their rock and minerals test on Monday. Today, we made a class study guide that they can use to help them study. In addition, they are bringing home their entire science folder that has their Magic School Bus book, the Magic School Bus book questions, their earth materials notebook and experiment reflections. They will have a study log to fill out every night and there is a spot for parents to sign daily. Since the test falls on a Monday, I asked that they take one day this weekend to study. The class said this was fair since they won't have homework on Halloween! If you have any questions along the way, please don't hesitate to ask!
Mrs. Stygles

Week of October 15th

**This is our first blog entry written by the students with a little bit of help from me!**

Updates and Announcements
Written by: Cassidy, Jack C, Shane, Giana

• On October 23rd, there will be a data test so remember to bring your vocabulary ring home to study.

• The scholastic book orders come home today and you can order online by next week! If you order a book online, the classroom gets a free book.
• The school Halloween Party is October 26th. Remember to bring toilet paper for the mummy wrap!!  

Reading
Written by: Derek, Kaitlyn, Annie, Tommy

• On Monday we talked about revising our predictions.
• On Tuesday we talked about readers make strong predictions when they know their characters.
• On Thursday we talked about not reading so fast so we can notice the small details.
• On Friday we learned about inferring. To infer means to use the schema or background knowledge with clues from the story. Text + Schema = Inference

Writing
Written by: Jack, Keith, Amy and Brenna

• On Monday, we looked at the rubric to see how we’re going to be graded on our personal narrative and we made some changes to the rubric.

(This week, the class took a district wide writing assessment. The purpose of this assessment is to see where students persuasive writing abilities are and to monitor their growth over the year).

• On Tuesday we watched a movie about school lunches while we took notes. After we did that, we wrote a summary of what the movie was mostly about.
• On Wednesday we read passage two. We read an article about a school in Chicago where kids were not allowed to bring lunches from home. We wrote a summary of the article after that.
• On Thursday we read about English researchers that were studying if school lunches were healthier.
• On Friday we wrapped up the writing assessment by choosing a side and writing down many reasons why we chose that opinion.

Science:
Written by: Paris, Liam, Tyler, Hallie, Parsa

• On Monday and Tuesday, we did a project called Take it for Granite in our earth materials notebook.
• We took minerals called Hornblende, Feldspar, Quartz, Mica, and Calcite and tested how hard they were. We found the properties of all the minerals and rocks. Then we tried to figure out which minerals make up granite.
• On Thursday we learned about the rock cycle and watched a brainpop video with Tim and Moby about it.
• We read about sedimentary rocks and jotted down new facts we learned.

Math
Written by: Sophie, Brien, Stacey, James

• On Monday we took our data from our project and made line plots that show the two different groups.
• On Tuesday we looked at mystery data. This is when we were given data and we have to guess what the line plots were about.
• On Wednesday we made line plots about two woman basketball players named Yolanda and Mabika.
• On Thursday we looked at the two line plots to see which player is a better basketball player.
• We looked at different data sheets to review for the test.

Week of October 8th

Updates and Announcements:
I want to thank Mrs. Cox and Mrs. McCusker for volunteering to be our room parents! We're looking forward to a fun year!

I would like to thank Mr. Goguen, one of our technology coaches, for creating a shortcut to our website. You can simply type in tinyurl.com/4Shome and it will take you directly to the classroom website. 

My goal for the website and the blog is for them to be as useful to parents and students as possible. I am looking for feedback about what's working and suggestions on how to improve the blog or website. In addition, I'm hoping to slowly release responsibility of the blog to the students. It will promote creative writing and allow them to take more ownership over their learning!

Reading
The focus of our new reading unit is to build a deeper understanding of characters by visualizing, predicting and inferring. The unit is broken into different sections and the first section promotes these reading strategies by encouraging students to walk in the character's shoes. 

• Readers can make a movie in our mind where we become one of the characters.
• Readers need to notice times when they are reading on emotional autopilot, maybe understanding the text, but not taking it in. When we read, we need to see not just words, but also the world of the story through the eyes of the character.
• Readers not only visualize, but we often empathize with the characters by remembering times in our lives when we lived through something similar.
• Readers not only see, hear, and imagine the story as if they are there, they also revise their mental movie as they receive new clues from the text.

Writing

• One of the skills that students are working on in their personal narrative is meaningful dialogue. Using a passage from our read aloud, students shared what they noticed about dialogue in order to enhance their dialoge. 
• Previously, students planned their story using dot and jots. We discussed how to turn our dot and jots into a narrative story and how to stretch out our dot and jots. 
• We studied a few different leads from various stories and students matched strategies to the leads. Students then drafted three leads and chose a new one for their story.
• I read out loud a few different endings from stories we've read this year. Students named strategies that the authors did.

Science

• Students observed the evaporation dishes from our calcite experiment. It was neat to see what was left behind. 
• We spent a few days reading The Magic School Bus: Inside the Earth and answering a variety of questions that will help them review for the Rocks and Minerals test. 
• Different desk clusters were assigned a question that they had to become an expert on and teach the class. I wish I recorded them teaching their topic because it was very entertaining to watch! 

Left: Evaporation dish of water that had calcite in it
Right: Evaporation dish of vinegar that had calcite in it

Vinegar evaporation dishes of basalt, sandstone,                limestone and marble

Math

• Students spent time comparing the height of fourth graders and first graders to determine how much taller a fourth grader is than a first grader. Students were encouraged to look at the clumps/clusters of data to answer the question. 
• Students learned how to find the median of data and practiced this on data about cavities. 
• Students were put into groups of three for our data collection project. They had to come up with a survey question that would result in numerical data. They tried their questions out on other class members and had to revise their question if there were any confusions. 
• Mr. Wolfe and I tried a new way of collecting data. We put the students questions into a google document and students filled out each others surveys on the computer. 

Homework for October 15th

Hello! Tonight students will be working on a "Books I'm Interested In" sheet that is in their google documents. I've shown them how to look books up by levels on the Scholastic Website. They do not need to look up and see if they are in the Hanlon library, we will do that another time.

To log into their google accounts, students should use their login information that is in their M.O.O.S.E. binder.
Here are some tips for logging into their google accounts:

1. We use www.wpss.org and click on student email. 
2. If that doesn't work, they can log into it using regular google accounts but they need to add   @wpsstudents.org
3. You can also try to log onto the site using this login page

• Google Aps work best on Google Chrome. 
• If students are not able to log into their Google account, they should just use a separate piece of paper. 
• To create more rows, they should put their curser in the last box and hit tab.

When you get to scholastic book wizard:

1. Click: Search by reading level
2. Click: Guided reading
3. Put your level in both spots
4. Click Find
5. They should sort their books by clicking on the Grades 3-5 tab on the left side

Week of October 1st

I can't believe we're already in October. We concluded our Student Council elections. Here is a picture of all the students who ran for Student Council and I'm so proud of the students for taking a huge risk. Congratulations to our new Student Council representatives, Derek and Hallie!

Just as a reminder, school picture day is Tuesday, October 9th!
Here are some updates about our learning this week!






Reading:

• We wrapped up our launching unit with discussing different ways students can keep their discussions going. 
• In reading workshop, students read their D.E.A.R. books and track their thinking on stickies. I introduced the idea of "writing long" off a sticky and students tried this on their own in their reading response journal.
• After reading through the journal entries, I chose a few entries that went beyond retelling the story (noticing how the character changed, what a character did that was surprising and coming up with a theory about a character).
• We wrote a "response" together as a class using our read aloud as a common text.  

 Writing:

• We launched our personal narrative unit on Monday. Choosing a topic can be a hard task but students learned that writers often choose topics that have a strong emotion behind it and possibly a lesson learned. 
• Students brainstormed different emotions and possible stories to match.
• We spent two days planning the beginning, middle and end. Students learned to add dialogue and sensory details to their plan and use color coding to make sure they had it sprinkled throughout their story. 
• We reviewed our rules for drafting such as skip every other line, let the ideas flow and don't get bogged down worrying about spelling. 
• Students focused on developing setting details in their writing. 

Math:

• Students spent time reviewing for the unit 1 math test and took the math test on Tuesday.
• We began a new routine this week called broken calculator. This is where students create equations following certain rules and certain numbers can't be used.
• We began our data unit by discussing what data is and examples of how people collect data.
• Each student received a bag with a handful of cubes in it and they had to work together to organize the data. 
• Students measured their heights to the nearest half in and we created a class line plot to analyze and interpret the data. Words and phrases we used to analyze the data are outliers (unusual), range (if data is spread out), maximun, minimum, and cluster/clump of data (typical).
• Now that we had an idea of what the typical height for fourth graders are, we're using sample data to determine how much taller fourth graders are compared to first graders. They spent time trying to represent two sets of data.

Science:

• Students finished the scratch test on Monday and reflected on the activity. This activity allows students to test one of the properties of minerals, which is hardness. 
• We observed some new rocks as part of the calcite test activity. Students learned that calcite is one of the most abundant minerals on earth and is the only mineral to react to acid. We had some sample rocks and put each rock in vinegar to look for a reaction, which would give us evidence that calcite is a mineral present in that rock. 
• We let the vials sit overnight and observed them two days later. Students looked for additional evidence for calcite and they wanted to pour the vinegar into evaporation dishes to see what would be left behind. We will find out when they return from the three day weekend.
• We began reading The Magic School Bus: Inside the Earth to continue learning about rocks and minerals and how they form