This Week in Fourth Grade

Hello Spring!

This week we celebrated the arrival of Spring (and the feeling of summer at times) by reading poetry and practicing our comprehension strategies outside.  The poem we looked at was Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost.  Students needed to utilize a number of their senses while comprehending this poem.  We also utilized our outdoor setting to help us better understand the poem.  Many students made a connection between where we sat outside and the meaning of the poem and many had some great inferences as to what the theme of the poem might be.  It was wonderful to see students thinking and discussing so deeply all the while enjoying the weather!  Below are some pictures of the activity:

Time Capsule

Our Time Capsule Closing Ceremony is fast approaching!  Please let us know if you need another copy of the list sent home. 

Save The Date!

Farley's Memorial Day Assembly will be held on Friday, May, 25th at 9:00.  Stay tuned for more details!

Football Frenzy!

Last week we started a cooperative group activity called Football Frenzy to help us to use our problem solving strategies to review some of the math concepts that we have learned this year.  On Monday the kids were put into teams.  The whole class was given a problem to solve.  The teams worked together to solve the problem using the problem solving strategies.  They needed to talk and discuss where to start with the problem and then how they were going to attack the problem using what they have learned.  Each team that worked together to come up with an answer was given the chance to choose a card that told the amount of yards that the team would move on the football field.  It was great to see the groups working as teams- talking and discussing their thinking!

Writing Workshop

We have successfully started our research project!  Each student had to make the decision about whether he or she would like to learn about Dolphins or Whales.  

The kids were able to take their learning from reading nonfiction texts to help them as they started to read the different texts about whales and dolphins.  They were able to use note-taking strategies that they had tried our during social studies and also learned a new strategy for taking notes on index cards.  When writing a research book we need to be in search of facts that make you say "WOW!!" or "COOL!"  Ask your child a "WOW" fact that he or she read about last week!  

This week we will continue to build our research notes and will begin to categorize our notes into groups.