Our week began with our grade level meeting. This week's mantra, "Breathe together, sing together" was evident in our yoga pose of the week. Students made small "forests" by doing the tree pose with a partner or partners.
This week, our focus during Reader's Workshop continued to be on reading nonfiction texts and finding main idea and supporting details in those texts. We created guiding questions, and searched for information to answer those questions. We loved reading books about various dogs, and also enjoyed watching "Dogs 101" videos from Animal Planet. We wrote summaries about the dogs we researched, too. Next week we will continue to read nonfiction texts, and work to connect all of this information, so that we can use our knowledge to research other topics.
We finally finished writing our fiction stories, and we were PROUD! We enjoyed reading each other's stories, and sharing our writing with our friends! This week we began essay writing. We have discussed how to generate topics to write about, and have "noticed" many new things about both school and home. We will use our "noticings" to generate more essay topics.
Learning about fractions has been fun and challenging! We have been working with various manipulatives to help us to understand these concepts. The students have been working hard to learn these concepts, and will will continue to practice them next week. We will be having a math assessment on the topic of fractions on Friday. The study guide can be found here.
We had a few BEAUTIFUL days for outdoor recess!
What an amazing Concert today! Students did a fantastic job singing, and we had several soloists and speakers from our class. A true example of how hard work pays off!
I was able to record the first half of Lost Boys and This Little Light of Mine. Thank you to Mrs. Freedman for sharing the full version of Lost Boys (see below)!
Lost Boys
This Little Light of Mine
Lost Boys (Full Version) - Thank you Mrs. Freedman!
Happy New Year! It is always wonderful to return to school and revisit our hopes and dreams for the New Year. Many of the students began the week feeling down about their return to school, but after the first day, things began to look up for everyone!
Book Talk
Book Talk
During reader's workshop, we have started to work on research. We are focusing on finding main ideas, and supporting topics and details in books about dogs. We have created guiding questions, so that our readers have a focus for their reading. This has been really fun for many of the students. Over the next few weeks, we will continue to read about different types of dogs, and practice finding main idea and supporting evidence from the text.
Writer's workshop was devoted to finishing our fiction stories and we are ALMOST there! Students revised and revised their stories, in order to be sure their message was clear. We will wrap up the stories on Monday - and share our stories with one another then. During Poetry Workshop with Mrs. A. Williams, we learned about Robert Frost and wrote free verse poems about weather, in the style of Robert Frost. We will work at publishing these poems over the next week.
We began math this week with a few review lessons. We reviewed factors and multiples, as well as prime and composite numbers. Today we began reviewing fractions by looking at pattern blocks and determining fractional parts of these. Our fraction unit will take another few weeks, and we will use many different hands on materials in order to support and enhance our learning.
During Technology this week, we began to brainstorm ideas for our first videos. We had some great thoughts about what type of video would best support our fellow fourth graders. Stay tuned for these videos!
We also began our study of the United States by learning what a region is. We learned that the climate, landforms and animals are some of the things that help determine how a region is mapped. Our first stop in our study is the Northeast Region, and we will travel there on Monday.
Happy New Year! I have been watching this live stream on and off throughout the vacation. It is fascinating! The parent eagles (a mother and father) have been taking turns keeping the eggs warm. One baby eagle has hatched, and another is hopefully on its way! In late January/early February, we will be learning about animal adaptations. Check out the mom and dad eagles, and see if you can find anything that would help them survive in the wild. Comment below with anything you notice!
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