Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Tie Dye Tuesday

Tie Dye Tuesday was a GREAT success!  The weather cooperated, and the t-shirts look fantastic.  Many thanks to all of the parents who came to help the fourth grade today!  Special thanks to Mr. Marsh, Mrs. Park, Mrs. Titmuss, Mrs. Toli, and Mrs. Walmsley for their help.

A note was sent home yesterday with directions for washing your child's shirt, along with some of the events we'd like the children to wear their shirts to.  Tomorrow is our chorus concert, and we'd love the children to wear their shirts.






















After we dyed our shirts, we were able to review line plots using the data from our mining activity last week. We were surprised with the results.  Below is a photo of our line plot.  I wonder if your children were as surprised as their teacher about the results.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Our Week in Review

What a week we had in Room 24!

In Math, we started to learn about angles.  We have been measuring them with full circle protractors and half circle ones.  We are really good at this, too!  We watched a Brainpop Video which helped us to understand the difference between supplementary angles and complimentary angles. We will continue to work on this, and take a test on angles next week.  We also have been working on learning how angles and lines can work together to make interesting designs. We will continue to work on these line designs through the end of the school year.

Today we took what we know about lines and designs, and we tied our t-shirts for Tie Dye Tuesday.  We are so excited to dye our shirts after the long weekend, and can't wait to see how awesome the ORANGE turns out!








In Reading, we are continuing to read Charlotte's Web.  We are having some excellent discussions about the main characters in this book, and their actions.  We are learning to read and think about why characters act the way they do. We have also been reviewing foreshadowing as a writing technique.  E.B.White does a lot of foreshadowing in this book. (Many students haven't read the book or seen the movie, so please don't give away the ending!)

In Writing this week, we worked at wrapping up some of our lingering poetry.  Students finished writing "forgiveness poems" and poems about clowns.  You will get to see all of our hard work at our Poetry Coffeehouse in June.  We also began writing "expert pieces" in writing.  We are working with Mrs. Williams's class to learn about this style of writing.  This week we chose our topics, created a table of contents and started to think about what text features our writing will need.  We also had the opportunity to tell our ideas to a friend.






In Social Studies this week, we wrapped up learning about the west region.  We learned about the miners in California and about Levi Strauss (who made the first pair of jeans for the miners to wear.  Today we had the opportunity to mine for gems. We found some really cool things!  




We also started to learn about immigration this week.  We were lucky enough to have a guest speaker come to talk to all fourth graders about his immigration experiences.  Bleddyn's dad was here, and he told us about his very interesting childhood, about where he lived, and about Bleddyn's families immigration experiences.  He brought a very cool power point to share with us, too.  We learned so much!  Thank you!







Tuesday, May 21, 2013

A NEW SCHOOL RECORD!

Congratulations to Declan, who now holds the Kennedy School Record for the mile run.  Declan ran the mile in today's heat in an amazing 6 minutes and 34 seconds.  Way to Go!!


Saturday, May 18, 2013

Our Week in Review

We had a busy, busy week in room 24!  During the first part of this week, we focused on MATH, MATH MATH!  We finished our MCAS review on Monday, and were ready for the last part of our MCAS journey on Tuesday and Wednesday. We are officially finished with MCAS!!!!

Another exciting thing that happened this week is that our last student earned his BLACK BELT for Recorder Karate! Mrs. MacMurray and Mrs. Merten are so proud.  Mrs. Merten has agreed to give a recorder concert to our class, and she is practicing up now, so she is ready.  We are very excited for our concert on May 30.

Later in the week, with Mrs. Williams's class, we started to learn about poet, Douglas Florian.  We painted nature scenes on brown bags, and then we wrote poetry inspired by our paintings.  We had a fun time with this activity, and Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Merten were very impressed with our poems.  Here we are painting our pictures.








On Thursday we were SO excited to have our SKYPE with the west region.  We met Mr. Pahl's fourth grade class from Bellingham, Washington.  We loved meeting them and learning about what they like to do there.  We learned that Washington is rainy!  Mrs. Williams took our notes as their class answered our questions.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Merten's screen shots got lost, but Mr. Pahl took some pictures, that you can see here, on his blog, Be Good Humans. It is really cool to see our class on their screen, and to see our new friends clearly.


We are gearing up for the end of the year, and looking forward to starting to study Electricity and Magnetism in Science, as well as finishing our study of the US.  We hope to have one more Skype with  the southwest region. 

Keep working hard!  We are almost there !!!




Friday, May 3, 2013

Our Week In Review

This was a very busy week in our class!

In Math we have been working on reviewing for the Math MCAS. We have been reviewing a concept a day, and have also been working on how to answer Open Response Questions.  Mrs. Merten is quite impressed with our work on Open Response Questions.  We continue to work on test-taking strategies, particularly with answering multiple choice questions.  We continued our math review this week during our technology block.  We worked with some math games that review topics we've covered.  Your child can show you some of the games using the links from our blog!


In Reading, we have slowly been making our way through Charlotte's Web, by EB White.  We are working on reading with expression, in addition to the more challenging concepts of character motivation and author's message.  Miss Boulay will continue to teach reading next week, right up until her last day on Friday. During Reading Zone, and independent reading at home, we have read a whopping 1037 books!

In Writing, we had a special treat this week.  Our Poet In Residence, "Ms. Liz" came and worked with our class for two days.  We were inspired, and wrote some beautiful poetry.  You will have a chance to see and hear some of it at our Poetry Coffeehouse this spring. Below are some videos of Ms. Liz teaching us a poetry chant, and of some of us doing a poetry reading.


















We will wrap up our unit on the Midwest, and our unit on Weather next week.  We will have a test on Tuesday and one on Thursday.  Your child has a study guide and has been reminded to bring materials home.
From the Teacher's Desk:
Today you will also receive a pink notice with important spring dates.  Please look for that in your child's backpack. If you are interested in volunteering for any of these events, please contact me as soon as possible.