This Week in 4th Grade....

I hope everyone was able to enjoy the Thanksgiving break.  Hopefully you and your child had a chance to relax and have fun with friends and family. 

Writing Workshop

The kids have a had a chance to write a literary essay with a partner over the past few weeks.  Partners have worked together to plan out the essay and write the essay on Google Docs.  This week the students will work on a mid-unit assessment to see what each individual student has an understanding of and what each child needs to continue to work on.  This will help us to work with the students later this week to create goals for the remainder of the Literary Essay unit.

Math Workshop

Last week we started to learn about the Area Model for Multiplication.  In fourth grade, students do not need to learn the standard algorithm for multiplying larger numbers.  If the students have this as a tool in their back pocket they will be encouraged to use it for checking their work, however, our focus in school with be on learning and practicing the Area Model and/or Partial Product.  This way of learning multiplication helps to build a foundation of helping students truly understand how multiplication works.

                  For example:  13 x 7

Students work to find the area of each smaller rectangle and then add the products together.  

We are finishing up with our Multiplication Fluency packets.  We will be working on the 11's this week and then the 12's next week.  In school, we will continue to work on using strategies for determining the answer to a multiplication problem.  Skip counting is one of the strategies that we will encourage students to use when they are stuck on a multiplication fact.  The strategy sheet shown here is another way that students will be taught to think about tricky facts.  Multiplication fact errors is where most students fall apart when solving larger multiplication problems. 

Science Workshop

Students had the exciting opportunity to participate in a hands-on science workshop offered by the Action Child's Science Museum at school this past week.  They were challenged to develop an insulation capsule to protect a "NASA device" called "CAT."  This device was to be sent to a new planet that had been discovered but was very sensitive to temperature so it needed to be insulated.  Prior to this challenge, students explored various types of insulation and attempted to identify the best material to insulate with.  It was wonderful to see everyone working together with the engineering process.

Kindness Month

We wrapped up Kindness Month with a "Things We Like About ________" activity.  Each student had their own sheet of paper and all students took turns writing what they liked about each other on the sheets.  It was heartwarming to see the kind and thoughtful notes that students wrote to each other.  Following this activity, students took the time to think about someone in their lives that they are especially thankful for.  They wrote thank you cards to these people.

With that being said, we both wanted to share how thankful we have been this year for such a wonderful group of students and families to work with.  We appreciate all of your support and enthusiasm you have shared with us this year!

Jaime and Jen

This Week in Fourth Grade...

I hope everyone had a great weekend!  I can't believe we are heading into Thanksgiving week!  Tomorrow we will have an in school "field trip."  The Acton Discovery Museum will be coming to school to do an hour long hands-on presentation for both homerooms. 

                        

Science

Both classes had the chance to do some hands-on experimenting in science last week.  It is always  so fun to see what creative ideas the kids have to help them solve a problem.

Reader's Workshop

On Friday we extended our learning about characters by learning how we can think about character change in books.  We learned that a character's traits, feelings, actions or thoughts may change in a story and that we can use a story arch to track these changes.  Following our new learning, students were partnered up and began to practice this type of thinking and began to create their own character change archs.  We will continue this learning before and after Thanksgiving.  Below is an example of a character arch and a photo of students working together to create their own.

Kindness Week

Kindness Week continued and is turning into Kindness Month!  This week students learned about bystanders and what they can do when they find themselves as a bystander in a situation.  Students worked with partners and created comics where they needed to brainstorm what they could say if they were to be a bystander at some point.  Next week we will extend our kindness to others by thinking about what we like about each other.  We also have a small thankfulness project planned in honor of the upcoming holiday!

Math Workshop

To go along with our learning about area and perimeter, the kids were able to create a Dream House.  After creating the floor plan, partners were able to work together to determine the area and perimeter of some of the objects in each room as well as the area left over in some of the different rooms they created. This led to great conversations and some deeper learning around area and perimeter!

Brain Breaks

Each day we stop for a Brain Break and Bathroom Break....one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The kids work so hard during each subject that they need a chance to give their brains a break for a few minutes so that they are ready to learn again!

There are many dance and movement videos that the kids can follow along with during each Brain Break.  Last week, after trying the Electric Slide and Macarena, some of the kids put in a special request for the Cha Cha Slide.  Here is a peek into one of our Brain Breaks!  Enjoy!

Brain Break in Action

Just a reminder that Wednesday is a 1/2 day!  We hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving! 

Jen and Jaime

This Week in 4th Grade....

Kindness Week

This past week we launched Kindness Week in our community.  We began by asking students to share memories of others being unkind to them and how it made them feel.  I think that students were surprised to see how many of their classmates have been affected by unkind words from others.  I think more jarring to all, was how the careless words of one could have such an effect on the feelings of others.  We also spent time this week discussing what someone can say when another is being unkind.  Many times, students are so taken aback when another is being mean that they can think of nothing else but to do it back or to take the mean comments as truth.  We are hoping to teach other ways for students to react to these situations.

Next week we will discuss what bystanders can do when they encounter these situations and spend some time thinking about what we like about the members of our community.  Then we will move towards performing random acts of kindness.

Reader's Workshop

It was wonderful to see nearly all students turn in their reading response homework on time this past week.  Thank you so much for the support you gave to students this week.  They will have the same assignment this week and in school we will look at how they can lift the level of that work.  Please let me know if your child is struggling with this assignment so that I can support them here in school.

Book Orders

Book orders were sent home last week and are due on Wednesday.  To order online our classroom code is H3M9C.  Books make fantastic Christmas gifts as the cold winter months approach.  If you are planning on giving your child the books you order as a gift, please let me know and I will leave them in the office for you to pick up so that your young reader has no idea!

Math Workshop

We finished Module 2 on the metric system last week.  We were able to use the data we collected from the Metric Olympics to place our results on a number line to compare distances.  

Later in the week we started Module 3.  This unit includes area, perimeter, multiplication, and division.  We started the module with area and perimeter.  The kids were able to take their previous learning from 3rd grade to help them with what they need to learn in fourth grade around area and perimeter.  This week we will start a real world application project for finding area and perimeter.  Be sure to ask your child what he/she is designing!

We hope everyone has a great week!

Jaime and Jen

This Week in Fourth Grade....

Happy November!  I can't believe that we are already TWO MONTHS into fourth grade.  What a busy couple of months it has been!  We have spent a lot of time building relationships with our peers, discussing what we want our community to look and feel like, we have learned a lot  and had a lot of fun in the process!  

Halloween STEM Challenge....

On Tuesday, the kids were given a challenge....using only 4 pieces of construction paper, 6 inches of masking tape, and a dictionary, create a way to get the dictionary (and a gourd) at least 6 inches off of the ground.  We have some very creative fourth graders!  Here are some of their creations...

Math Workshop

Last week, the kids were given the chance to look at their Module 1 Math Assessment and reflect on the assessment.  Each student was given time to look closely at the assessment and write down something that they were proud of as well as a skill that they wanted to continue to practice. Tomorrow the kids will bring home their assessment.  Along with the assessment, you will find your child's reflection sheet, the scoring rubric, and a place for you to sign stating that you have seen the assessment.  Please send this back no later than Wednesday.  There is also a place for you to request additional practice pages for your child if you would like. 

Metric Olympic Games

We started our second module in math on Metric Measurement.  After learning about the metric measurements for length, weight, and capacity, we held the very first LL Corner Metric Olympic Games!  There was a lot of excitement for the Olympic events which included the Straw Javelin Throw, Cotton Ball Shot Put, Right Handed Marble Grab, and Left Handed Sponge Squeeze.  This week we will use the results of the events to help us with ordering and comparing metric measurements.

Reader's Workshop

This week we continued to think about characters by looking for patterns in their thoughts, actions and dialogue.  We would then used these patterns to help us grow more ideas about the characters.  We looked back at an immigration story we had read and worked in partnerships to find these patterns.  I really enjoyed the conversations that students had as they worked with their partners!

We also are continuing to build our passion for reading and did some more book recommendations this week.  Sometimes all it takes is one book to turn a reluctant reader around.  With this in mind, I began "giving the gift of reading" to students this week.  Ask your child what I am talking about!

Social Studies

Students have been learning about Ellis Island and how authors can use their research to inform the fiction they are writing.  Next week, they will read about current students that have immigrated to the United States.  In the next several weeks we will be starting a cooperative project in the classroom that will involve using what we have learned about immigration to write a fictional account of journeying to Ellis Island.

New Homework Assignment!

Tomorrow, students will be coming home with a new reading assignment.  It will be due on Thursday since there is no school on Friday.  We practiced this new assignment on Wednesday of last week and will practice again tomorrow during Reader's Workshop.  Students will bring both of these practice pages home to be used as a guide of what is expected when they do the assignment.  We have also discussed that if there are any difficulties completing the assignment at home, they should bring it to school so that I can support them.

In addition, if your student would like to complete the assignment on google docs and share it with me instead of doing the worksheet version, they may.  Please let me know if you have any questions and thank you for your support as we help our students grow and develop responsibility!

Have a great week!

Jaime and Jen