Our Week In Review

What a busy week we have had in Room 24!  Even with the summery weather, we have accomplished quite a bit.

In Math, we have been working diligently to read and write large numbers and to review the place value system.  We have also learned the skills of rounding and of comparing two numbers.  Today we had a math quiz on these topics.  Next week we will review addition and subtraction and the children will learn a few different ways to solve these types of problems. When we finish with addition and subtraction, we will have a unit test on all of the concepts learned so far.  Your child will receive a study guide to use to help prepare for the test.

If your child is having some difficulty with place value or rounding, I am including a few videos from "Kahn Academy" with some information about place value and rounding.  This may be a good way to review these concepts.

    Place Value 1: Place Value 1

    Rounding Whole Numbers 1: Rounding Whole Numbers 1

In Reading we have been talking about the different genres of books.  We discussed the different clues to help children know what genre their book is.  This week, the children will be tracking GENRE on their reading logs for homework.  We have also been working on Narrative Elements in Reading. We spent some time talking about plot by reading two different books by Chris Van Allsburg.  We will continue this topic next week, along with learning about strategies that good readers use.  All book bags have been filled, and the children now have the responsibility to keep their bag filled.

Today we began our first engineering activity.  Students will be creating "Puff Mobiles" in cooperative groups.  Mr. Adams (Mrs. Adams' husband and an engineer) came to JFK this morning and talked to the whole fourth grade about the engineering process.  Mr. Adams showed us this video:

We learned about teamwork and we started to sketch some designs. We are so excited to start this project!

We also had a chance to share our "puzzle pieces" in front of the class.  This was an option for those who were interested.  We had already shared these pieces with our class in small groups, but we enjoyed hearing about each other in the big group!

Our Week In Review

(One of our Book Talks)

This week, we finished reading Snow Treasure. Most of the students rated this book a 9 or a 10 because it was such an exciting adventure story. We discussed characters ~ and decided if we would like to be friends with the main characters of this story. Here we are talking about this.





Many of us would like to be friends with Peter Lundstrom ~ who is brave, smart and daring. We also learned about figurative language in this book. One thing we tracked was onomatopoeia. We created a wordle of the examples of onomatopoeia we found in this book. Here is a small copy of our wordle. Everyone has a copy in their reading journals.

One more reading update ~WE HAVE READ 660 BOOKS THIS YEAR!!!! I am so proud!

Some children have expressed that they are having trouble with Recorder Karate. Here is a link which will help the children with recorders.

Recorder Karate Help (Be sure to have your password ready!)

Other News
Today Miss Johnson was a substitute teacher at Kennedy! We were so excited to see her, and to have her visit when she had time today!!! We miss her, but were SO excited to see her again. We hope that she substitutes at Kennedy again!