This Week in Fourth Grade

STEM

On Wednesday, we celebrated Fall by giving students a stem challenge.  They needed to create a platform that would hold up a dictionary and pumpkin 12 inches off of the ground by only using 12 inches of masking tape and 4 pieces of construction paper.  Students learned to work as a team as they rose to the challenge!  Below are some pictures of the activity.

Reader's Workshop

This week, we continued to think about characters more deeply by taking what they having been saying, thinking and doing in a text and categorizing this information.  Once students had a category of evidence, they decided on a character trait that would best describe these actions.  Next week we will consider a character's motivations behind their actions and look at how they react to obstacles.  Woven into all of this reading and thinking are lessons on how to write about our thinking around reading.  Students are becoming much more analytical as the year has gone on!  Below are some pictures of their thinking:

Math Workshop

We started our unit on Metric Measurements last week.  The kids started to see the patterns when converting between kilograms and grams, kilometers and meters, and liters and milliliters.  Understanding the patterns helped the kids to be able to solve problems and talk about their thinking around this type of problem.  

This week we will hold the Metric Olympic Games.  Students will be able to apply their learning from last week to help sort through the results of the Olympic Games.

Science

As we continue through our sound unit in science, the kids were very excited to try out some experiments using a tuning fork.  The question that they were answering was around the evidence that they have to prove the tuning fork was vibrating.  

Teamwork

As the year continues, the relationships among the class have continued to strengthen.  On Thursday, we spent morning meeting in the gym playing a game that required students to work as a team in order to be successful.  They learned about the value of communication all the while getting some valuable exercise before starting their day.