We have been very busy, both in school and outside of school.
In school, we have been learning about measurement in math. Before vacation, we started a week long introduction to measurement with the other fourth grade classes. Each fourth grader was placed on a team (with students from other classes) and assigned them a country. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, each "country" traveled together, having a different teacher for math every day. The snow day threw a glitch into our Olympic plans, so we will be finishing our math tour tomorrow, going to the fourth grade classroom we haven't been to, with our team. On Friday we will celebrate with our Math Olympics. To prepare for the Olympics, each team created a pair of "speed skates" and a "snowflake discus". Check back on Friday for pictures of our big day!
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| speed skates |
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| speed skates |
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| making our snowflake discus |
In writing, we continue to work on writing our essays. The snow days have impacted our timeline for publishing, but we are working hard on sharing our thoughts. In reading, we are continuing with our Interactive Read Aloud, Snow Treasure. We have been making many connections to history and World War II, as well as to our own life (and love of sledding)! During our read aloud, we have also been working on author's craft. Some of the things we have covered are:
- idioms
- metaphors/similes
- onomatopoeia
- personification
- foreshadowing
- and Mrs. Merten's favorite....the cliffhanger
These are challenging concepts to understand, and the children are doing a great job with them! We are working on finding some of these in our independent reading books as well.
Tomorrow we will have our second weather assessment. The topic is Humidity and the Water Cycle. We will then move onto Wind and how that impacts the weather. We also are lucky enough to have a real meteorologist from CBS join us. She will be talking to the fourth graders in March.
In Social Studies we continue to work our way through the northeast U.S. Next we will travel to the southeast.
On...Sammi! Her hockey team played in the championship "pond hockey" game in Foxboro Monday night. Her team won! Way to go!
On...Charlene! She has been learning how to do Chinese Yo-Yo and even performed for a group of people last week. Charlene brought her Chinese Yo-Yo to school today and demonstrated how to use it. Parents may hear a lot of requests for these after this experience. Check out Charlene's video of her performance and of our JFK performance.
Here is the performance today...
Please remember that if your child has a unique or exciting thing to share, that we will "Spotlight" him/her on our blog. Just email Mrs. Merten.
