We started this week with a trip to the Maker Space to complete our first engineering design challenge. After the challenge was presented: What new toy would you create? The students had a chance to ask questions, plan, and sketch their ideas. They were then given 4 pipe cleaners to make a prototype. Their ideas were great and we had a blast! This was also a very exciting week for my class of readers! Our scholastic order came and thanks to everyone's orders we were able to about 40 new books for our classroom library. We were so excited that we set aside special time to get to look at what was new and make a list in our readers' notebooks so were remember what looked interesting! Writers' Workshop has also been an exciting time. Actually, each time in our day all the kids have been excited to get to and are always trying their best! We have been working on our narrative story writing. We have learned that we write the best when we can relate it to what we know or have experienced. We have practiced planning on story arcs and have taken the time to think through and build strong characters. Science has been a thrilling experience so far this year. I'm lucky I have such a great group of listeners! We finished up learning about series circuits and how when everything has the same path to the energy source they don't work as well. For example, light bulbs are dim and motors are slow. This is when we started learning about parallel circuits and how we can still use one energy source but if components have their own path, they work better! We ended this week with a little teamwork challenge. Moving our desks for a new seat for October! This will allow us to work with others and see our room in a whole new view. I also wanted to mention the winner of our student council election was Caroline and our alternate is Sofia. I am very proud of each student who ran and I hope they continue to be leaders in our class and school!
Have a great long weekend!
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We started the week with student council speeches and elections! I was so proud of the students who stood up and gave speeches, they were well written and full of great ideas. I was also proud of the listeners as they were really listening to be sure they were making a decision that was right for them. We even voted like real voters taking turns in the private booths! Hopefully we find out the results next week! Next, we continued our science investigation of Energy by testing materials that allow energy to pass through them and materials the stopped the energy (conductors and insulators). We built a new circuit using a motor as our component. The students were unbelievable using their knowledge from the last lesson to complete this lesson so quickly. The discussions during this lesson were great and let me know we were understanding exactly what we were doing! Eager learners and hard workers! In reading we learned more about readers' workshop. We worked on genre and went over how to treats books as guests in our home. We also practiced buzzzing about books. Buzzing is small conversations about the book you are reading, by doing this we learn about different books that might be interesting to us. Mr. Grenham came to read to us. He read Ish by Peter Reynolds. We discussed how important it is to persevere and not give up, even when things get hard. We also learned about Mr. Grenham and his job as principal. We always enjoy our visits to the Maker Space and LMC with Mrs. Cowell. On Friday we got to go do a Social Studies task card activity. After, we learned how to use Plickers cards to check and discuss our answers. I can't wait to see what fun activities Week 5 holds!
We started learning our Social Studies curriculum. We each drew a map that came to our minds when we think about the world! We also did a gallery walk to see how all our ideas are very different! We will continue to work on Map Skills. We continued to work on establishing routines in our math workshop. Working together to practice learning is fun! We added in working on the computers and talked about what each center should look and sound like. We celebrated Dot Day! This is a day established by author Peter Reynolds. We read the book The Dot and talked about how we all are different and that everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. You can do anything if you just think about it with the right mindset! I also captured room 203 loving to read!
We started the week with an activity that lead to a great discussion about working together. The students had to work together to create a picture from a single line I gave them. Each student could only use their own color and at the end we could see that everyone had a part in making the picture. This visual represents everyone talking, discussing, planning, and having a part in the work. We dove into our first math lessons this week. We are starting the year with place value. We had lots of great conversations about numbers and the values of different digits. We also started to learn about math workshop routines and spent time playing a memory game to practice what we learned. We were very excited to get started with our science investigations as well. Energy is an exciting topic to start with. Our first lesson was learning that energy can come from lots of places and it helps make things work. Our first challenge was to figure out what was needed to light a light bulb! Everyone was successful and again it took teamwork and good discussions to make it happen. We also talked lots about El Deafo. We did a compare and contrast activity with Cece and ourselves. We visited our LMC and Maker Space this week, Mrs. Cowell has some great things planned for us this year!
Lastly, ask your students about all the crazy teachers at Dale Street that danced and sang a song on stage for them! The song was about our theme this year "Make Their Day". We have been getting to know each other, Dale Street, and new routines! We have been successful and great listeners and learners along the way. Here are so fun things we did this week: On the second day of school we had even more fun. We completed a STEM activity called Save Sam. The students had to work together by making a plan to get Sam into his life jacket, only catch...they couldn't use their fingers they had to use paper clips! We also did some work with our summer read: El Deafo by Cece Bell. We talked about the graphic novel genre and used it as inspiration to create our own about our summers! We also made some warm fuzzies to give to people we care about and to start our year off with something positive that makes us feel good! Lastly, perhaps the best part of 4th grade....LOCKERS! I really enjoyed the first 3 days with these SUPER kids! We learned a lot, laughed a lot, and are ready for what 4th grade has in store!
Have a great long weekend, see you Tuesday! |
Ms. MacDonaldWelcome to grade 4! Archives
February 2018
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