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