Book Review Unit

We will be learning how to write effective book reviews as a mini-unit in reading. I have asked students to find a book that they would like to read and write about. 

Here are the guidelines for picking a book:
1) it should be one that you've never read before.
2) it should be a fiction and a chapter book.
3) it should be within your reading level. It's very important that students are able to comprehend the book in order to write about it effectively. 

Determining reading levels can be tricky but I use Scholastic Book Wizard (http://www.scholastic.com/bookwizard/). Not every book has a reading level unfortunately! I recommend that students take some time to use Scholastic Book Wizard and brainstorm a few choices they would like to read. They can search specific titles or search for books within a range of reading levels. I'll give them time tomorrow to see if it's in my library or the school library. If they'd prefer to take it out from the Westwood Public Library, that's fine too. The book they read can be used for their reading log and should be completed by Monday, February 4th. Happy reading!

Congrats!!!

Congratulations to 4S! 
    The class has filled up their "You Rock" jar, which means they've earned a movie party. We will have it tomorrow, which is also Pajama Day! I told the class they can bring in a small pillow and a small blanket to use during the movie. Keep up the good work 4S!

Week of January 14th

4S Announcements:

• Pajama Day - Wednesday, January 23rd
• Unit 4 math test - Friday - January 25th. The test will include properties of shapes, perimeter, area, angles (acute, right, obtuse), lines (parallel, perpendicular, intersecting) and symmetry.  
• States and Capitals Test - Friday - February, 1st. 

Social Studies
Written by: Stacey, liam, and Tommy

• The first day of the week, we learned about how to present your poster and how make note cards for your presentations. Then we practiced presenting.
• On Tuesday and Wednesday we presented our posters to the class.
• The next day, we read an article on fossils  and we took notes on how they’re formed
• The last day of this week, we watched a powerpoint about fossils. We also watched a movie about the history of fossils and how they’re formed.

Reading
Written by: Giana and Amy  Parsa

• From  Monday to Thursday  we did our IRA. This is a reading assessment  that takes three to four days. We read a chapter book and answer questions as we go
• On Friday, our class learned what a myth is by watching a Powerpoint. We also read The Weaving Contest. It explains how spiders came to be.

Writing
Written by: kaitlyn, Derek, JACK F, JACK C SOPHIE

• First we learned how to write a conclusion paragraph and different ways to start them.

• On Tuesday we finish all our paragraphs and started revising our stories.
• We reviewed different transition words to start sentences off with and then we kept revising.
• We reviewed how to vary sentence lengths and sentence starters.
• Students worked more on revising and editing.

Math
Written by: BRIEN, KEITH, HALLIE

• Monday, we started our math workshop for the week and we did some menu activities. The menu activities were IXL, math facts, Logopaths mazes, study vocabulary cards and challenges. In the teacher station, we did crazy cakes in our math workbooks. That’s where we had to take shapes apart to find smaller shapes inside.
• The next day, the teacher station was the workpage, Is It Fair? We had to decide if shapers that were cut were equal pieces. Then we kept doing workshop activities.
• We started a new workshop on area and had new activities to do. We had the same menu choices though. The teacher station was finding the area of rectangles.
• We kept doing workshop and the teacher station was finding the area of polygons.
• The teacher station today was about lines, points, rays, and line segments. We also reviewed perpendicular and parallel lines.

Week of January 7th

Social Studies
Written by: Tyler,Parsa

• On Monday we learned how to mount our paragraphs on construction paper using the edges of the paper and rulers.

• The rest of the week, we worked on putting our poster together. We finished publishing our paragraphs, finished our illustrations, mounted everything, glued everything on and decorated the poster.

 

Reading
Written by:Derek, Parissophie

• On Monday we learned about text structure and we determined the structure of each article we read.
• On Tuesday we learned how to take notes on different text structure. Each group did one article and taught the note taking to the class.  
• On Wednesday we read the polar bear article while taking notes on it.
• On Thursday we finished our polar bear check in and wrote a response on how polar bears survive. We had to use specific evidence.
• On Friday we started our IRA’s. This is a assessment all fourth graders have to take. We read a chapter book and we stop at the stickies in the book to answer the questions.

 

Writing
Written by: Keith, Liam, Shane

• On Monday, we worked more on our expert projects. We worked on stretching out our dot and jots. Also we worked on our paragraph two for our expert project.
• Tuesday, we tried to start our sentences with catchy starters. Also we made our paragraph three for our expert projects. Mrs.Styles called some of us over to fix our paragraph two. There were some errors in our paragraphs.
• We learned how to end our paragraphs with a catchy ending. Also we did paragraph four for our expert projects.
• Today we learned the three parts of an intro paragraph. The three parts are: leads, background information or fun fact, and a thesis statement. Also we drafted our intro paragraph and some people finished up their paragraph four.

Math
Written by: Hallie, Brien, Stacey

• On Monday, we made right angles in our math workbooks. Later we started to learn about other types of angles. We also figured out the number of degrees in some angles from our Power Polygons.
• Then on Tuesday and Wednesday, we continued learning about angles and also started a two day math workshop. We made different types of angles with Mrs. Stygles and did math workbook pages to help us with angles.
• On Thursday, we learned about symmetry and we also made symmetrical shapes.  Then we had a small conversation on area and how to find the area of our designs.
• The next day, we continued finding the area of different shapes using triangle units. We had to compare the area of different shapes too.

Week of December 17th and January 2nd

Holiday Party

I want to thank Mrs. McCusker and Mrs. Cox for planning our holiday party. The students played "Minute to Win It" games and had a blast! Enjoy the photos!

 

 

 

Social Studies
Written by: Jack C., Liam, James and Parsa  ,  brien, Keith

• On Monday, the class learned how to take our notes and turn it into a paragraph.
• On Tuesday, we did our landmark captions for our regions project.
• On Thursday, the class did our natural resources caption for our regions project.
• When we came back, we wrote our final caption, the waterways caption. We also revised and edited our captions.
• Thursday, we continued to revise and edit our captions and started to publish our captions.
• We finished publishing our captions and started to illustrate our pictures for our posters.

Reading
Written by: Cassidy, Amy, Tommy, Tyler Paris

• On Monday, we determined the gist of the piece. To do that, we took out small details and held on to the big ones.
• On Tuesday we learned how to monitor our thinking while we read and how it transforms or changes.  
• We learned how to write a summary. A summary is a shorter version of the article in a nutshell.
• On Friday, we did a summary check in about bees. We found the gist of each paragraph and took those ideas and bunched them together to summarize the whole article.
• On Wednesday, we reviewed nonfiction reading strategies and wrote it down on a piece of chart paper. The chart was about tips for non-fiction readers and what to do before reading and during reading.
• We learned what it means to synthesize. That means we merge our thinking with what we’re reading. We wrote a synthesis response to something we have already read.
• On Friday, we learned how to include our thinking in our notes. This helped up write a synthesis response to what we read today.

  

Writing
Written by: Keith, Brien,  Annie and Brenna:

• We learned what similes are and it’s when you compare something using the words like or as. An example is this room is as black as night. We also were revising and finishing up our drafts.
• Tuesday, we learned how to combine short sentences. We also revised and edited our story.
• We learned how to paragraph our stories and we finished editing. Some times when you start a new paragraph is if time passed, you’re doing something new or someone new speaks.
• On Thursday, we were publishing and illustrating our stories.
• Friday was a very important day for us! We glued our books together with construction paper. Then we either bounded it, stringed it or ringed it.
• The class learned what a expert project is because that’s our new unit. It’s when you write about something that you’re an expert on. We brainstormed some topics too.
• On Thursday the class learned how to pick a topic. We planned that topic out after we picked it.
• Mrs. Stygles showed us how to plan our expert project and then we planned it. We learned that we have to use expert lingo so we sound like experts.

   

Math
Written by: Derek Jack!, Stacey Cassidy

• We did a math workshop from Monday to Tuesday. Some of the activities were measuring the perimeter of things around the room. We also found the perimeter of shapes on a computer game called logopaths. Everyone worked with Mrs. Stygles to measure the length of the classroom.  
• The next day we learned what a polygon (straight sides, has to be closed, no intersecting lines) is and we played a game called Guess My Rule.
• In class, we used power polygons to make shapes with different number of sides.  
• Today we made snowflakes using symmetry to decorate the classroom windows.  
• This week on Wednesday and Thursday, we were in a new math workshop. We played guess my rule, continued making polygon shapes and used logopaths to make rectangles with a perimeter of 600 and 800 steps.
• We did more work on quadrilaterals. We also did an activity where we learned about squares and rectangles and how a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square.