Sunday, February 17, 2013

Our Week In Review

What a week we had in room 24!  We all enjoyed a late start on Monday, to clean up from the blizzard!

We began the week celebrating Chinese New Year.  This is the year of the snake!  We made snakes in class, and discussed which animal represented the year we were born.  Mrs. Merten is the rooster!  The children were split between two animals. Ask your child which animal represents their birth year.  You can also check that out here.

In reading, we have continued to read the adventure story, Snow Treasure by Marie McSwiggan. This story is excited because the adventurous characters are about our age!  We continue to work on summaries and literary elements using this book.

In writing, we are working to finish up our essays.  After vacation, we will finish these, and then we will complete one last personal narrative before we have to take the writing part of the MCAS on March 19th.  Mrs. Merten is sure we will be ready!

In math, we wrapped up the second part of our fraction unit ~ adding and subtracting fractions and mixed numbers.  Although this new concept was a little challenging, we worked hard, and did and AWESOME job on our assessment!  Mrs. Merten and Miss Boulay helped us to create a new math "journal" that we can bring back and forth to school to use as a reference.

In science, we have continued to work on different aspects of weather, and in social studies we are working on our unit about the Northeast.  We will have an assessment in social studies on the Friday we return after vacation.  We took a study guide home on Friday. Mrs. Merten also told us about a fun activity we will be doing using Skype, talking to other fourth grade students around the US.  We will have our first Mystery State meeting on March 8th with a classroom from somewhere in the Northeast!

On Thursday, the entire fourth grade danced our way into school, doing the Cupid Shuffle.  This is an annual fourth grade tradition, and such a fun way to get moving on Valentine's Day!  You can see us dancing in the video below.




On Thursday, we also enjoyed our party in a bag, and shared Valentines.  We read a short myth about Cupid, and were surprised that we didn't know as much about him as we had thought. 

Friday, we celebrated Winter Wonderland Day by wearing our PJs and slippers to school.  We learned a cool way to cut out snowflakes, and will use the snowflakes in poetry next week.  

From the Teacher's Desk

The time between the first of the year and February vacation seemed to fly by!  We have been working hard at learning new concepts.  We have started a math journal for the children to bring back and forth to school, to use as a reference. This will allow students (and parents) to have a reference when doing homework and/or preparing for tests.  This will be a great supplement to our Everyday Mathematics Student Reference Book (SRB), which the children have been using this year.  Some of the new concepts we are learning this year do not have enough information in that text.  We will use this throughout our next unit on measurement.

I am very excited about our Skyping project. We will be "meeting" with different fourth grade (and one third grade) classes from across the US, to participate in a "mystery state" activity. We will ask the students questions about their state and then try to guess the state that they're from, and then we will answer questions about Massachusetts and they'll guess our state.  We will meet our first group of students in a few weeks.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Our Week in Review


It was another busy week in Room 24!  On Monday, we had an awesome visit from Mrs. Silvia of the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University.  Her presentation about the Inuit was terrific. Below are some videos and pictures from her presentation.  We will use some of the information we learned to create power points in the coming weeks.













Here we are playing two traditional Inuit games.  The winters were long and families spent a long time in their igloos.




Here we are participating in traditional Inuit dance.  The drumming was a very important part of this.




We have been working on writing our own essays during Writer's Workshop, and have continued to write free verse poems during our Poetry Workshop with Mrs. Williams.  We enjoyed some of our poems today!

In Math, we took our first fractions assessment.  We will be working on extending our knowledge of fractions in the next few weeks.  We will learn about adding, subtracting and even multiplying fractions. Today we had a chance to play a few math games.  It was fun!











In Social Studies, we began talking about regions, and will start our journey across the US with the study of the Northeast next week.  In Science, we will begin the next part of our Weather unit, with a review of the water cycle and various types of precipitation.


Spotlight On ~ Declan and Michael 
Last weekend, Declan and Michael played basketball during halftime of the Wheaton College Mens Basketball game.  Way to go guys!