We have been so busy this spring! Here is an update on what we have been working on! Please note that I have added a folder to your child's Google Drive. It is titled 2016/2017 pictures. this folder contains a lot of pictures from our field trip as well as other pictures from this year. We finished our Social Studies Green Screen videos! They are in your child's google Dive please check them out, they are really cool and well done for a first try at the type of project. This week we have been working on learning Figurative Language as well as continuing with our poetry study. Here we are working on Alliteration! We made it through ELA MCAS before vacation. We celebrated by taking some time outside ! We also had some very productive and much needed Maker Space Time! In math we have working on learning lots of vocabulary here we are acting it out playing a Simon Says game! Simon says: right angle! We also are learning to use protractors! Here are some pictures from our Field Trip that I think I forgot to post on here. I did Tweet them out though, be sure to follow me @msmacdonald2 We also got an exciting new piece of furniture! A standing desk...because who wants to sit all day?
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Some days are nice and some are cold, we are all ready for spring! Mrs. Fromen came and did a lesson with us with the chromebooks. We practice some fractions and then had some fun creating pixel art!
In Science we have been investigating with light waves. We have been focusing on reflecting light waves and using mirrors to control just where they go!
In math workshop we are finishing up with fractions and also have taken some time to think through some math challenges!
In Social Studies we are working on end project for regions. Each group is creating a green screen project to show their learning. On Thursday we had filming day! Next week we will be putting the projects together. Stay tuned for some pretty cool results!
We have been using Chromebooks on a regular basis. Today we used them to type a reading response to a story we read!
We have also had some great mystery readers!
It was great seeing everyone at conferences! Please don't forget to keep checking your students SeeSaw account for updated work. Recently we have put some math work on there showing off our fraction skills!
The year is just flying by! We have been busy with lots of learn and of course some fun! Here are some recent highlights! In reading we have been working in a Fairy Tale Unit. This unit is helping us learn different genres and also study characters and point of view. Recently we practiced Reader's Theater Fair Tales for fluency and then performed them for the class! We have quite a crew of actors in our class! Today we expanded on this learning. We took our knowledge of Cinderella and did partner writing. We wrote a scene from Cinderella from the point of view of one of the characters. It was very interesting to hear the thoughts and feelings of Prince Charming, The Fairy Godmother, and The Wicked Step-Sisters. Amazing work on a Friday afternoon! This week was Dr. Seuss' Birthday and we celebrated by having community readers visit us. Our class was lucky to have Mr. Parga from the High School come read "A Wocket in my Pocket" for us. We also read "Oh the Places You'll Go" and "The Sneetches" We also created our own Sneetch shirts and wrote about what makes us special. Lastly, we made a graph of our favorite Dr. Seuss Books. It was also exciting to use all our great teamwork skills down in the makerspace with Mrs. Cowell. We were able to participate in a Break Out session where we had to use clues and problem solving skills to crack the codes of all the locks! I was very proud of how well each group worked together. It has also been neat to see students plan and create our bulletin board in the hallway. So far we have had 3 groups Jan, Feb, and March. This project shows great planning, creating, and also teamwork and cooperation. #beproudbedale We are also working to finish up our opinion writing and will be moving on to Information writing soon. In math we have been adding and subtracting fractions and mixed numbers. (sorry I don't have pictures of this quite yet).
We completed a tutorial this week about the MCAS online to learn what it will look like and how to use all the tools available to us! Please remember math help is Wed morning and Thurs afternoons. Conferences are coming up please be sure to sign up for a time! Want to come in and learn with us? Please let me know your availability and interest and I would be happy to have your help! We have started to work in Literature Circles recently. Each group is reading a different book but we are all learning and practicing the same reading concepts. We are working on Noticing when characters change and asking why did they change? This is called a Contrast and Contradiction when we are reading. Each group is having great conversations as they go! Caught Focusing! I recently noticed some great work in action. Our class isn't very noisy they do a great a job, but there still might be some distractions. How do we deal with those so our work gets done? Check it out! *noise canceling headphones *facing away from distraction * finding a cozy corner We had another great opportunity in the Maker Space! This time I witnessed the most incredible amount of teamwork I have ever seen. Everywhere I looked there was teamwork. It was great seeing them help each other and not always looking to adults for a direction or explanation. Building great skills! We also had a great mystery reading last week. Shayla's grandfather! It was a treat to have such a special family member bring in a great Patricia Polacco story! We are still looking for mystery readers for February if you haven't come in yet! We had a great story teller come and teach us about Martin Luther King Jr to help us appreciate why we had Monday off! We are always thinking about our learning and updating our Tweets to be reflective learners. Look for these when they come home in Friday Folders or Homework Folders. Also don't forget to keep checking out SeeSaw for more learning and great thinking! Lastly, we have started learning about the states and regions. I hope everyone has seen the letter either in my email or when it came home in homework folders this week. Here is a link to a great song that may help students connect the states to the capitals! Thank you to Milena for sharing with us! Happy Friday and Go Pats!!
As we jump into 2017, I would like to start this blog post with a few reminders! * Please remember the weather is getting cold and we have outdoor recess most of the time, please be sure your child has appropriate clothing. If there is snow they are welcome to have all their snow gear to play in it or they can enjoy recess on the hard top. * Remember to check SeeSaw and Google Drive to see some great work and thinking. A lot of the work we do stays here in school in notebooks or on devices. We even capture some of our exciting science experiments in action! * RUSH calendars are due at the end of every month and should be written on each night. If you lose one, please let me know before the month is over. Since We've been back we have been up to important but fun happenings. Right away we got a visit from the Museum of Science where we learned about Animal Adaptations! In Science we have started to learn about Energy Tranfer and have started experimenting with steel balls and ramps. We have predicted that the larger ones pick up more speed and go faster and farther. Next week we will see if that is true! In reading we are working on noticing character actions and then noticing character changes. We are also working on how to write and express those ideas. Here we are working together to find some evidence to show how Trisha in the book Thank You, Mr. Falker changes throughout the story. We also had a great mystery reader today, Mr. Arnold! Have you ever seen a Whingdingdilly?
We have been having so much fun this time of year with our learning and extra events! Have a look! We had hat day recently as a fund raiser for coalition for courage! We ended raising $10,000 as a school as a result of all our fund raisers! We visited the makerspace again. Mrs. Cowell does a great job of helping us learn to problem solve and we realized when we make mistakes it's a great thing, because we learn so much from them! Once again we filled our marble jar and earned a class reward. This we chose extra recess while the weather was still warm enough! We had a blast and everyone worked hard to play nicely together! One of the most exciting this to happen in the last few weeks is we have a new classmate! His name is Roberto. I wanted to take a minute to share how proud I am of the class for making him feel welcomed and including him in everything! In Social Studies we have started our immgration projects and learning all about how our country came to include so many people from all over the world! In Writing we finished up our narrative writing for term one and have some great published work up in our room! In math we have been working hard learning division with remainders. We had a special lesson this week that really helped us think! There was some great reflection after this lesson from the students. Some of it included: " I see now, this helps me see a picture in my mind about what division is." "I wasn't sure how we were getting the remainders before, but now I see exactly where they come from and why!" We had an assembly to kick off Hour of Code. Mrs. Cowell introduced us to Dash and Dot and lots of ways we will be learning to code in the next few weeks. Caroline, even got to be part of the show! As always thank you so much to our mystery readers! We had Jake's mom come read Snowmen At Night (great for this time of year!) We also had Corey's mom come read to us about Persephone, which went along great with our mythology discussions and learning we have been having! The last few weeks have flown by and I can't believe it is already Thanksgiving break! Here are some highlights of the fun and learning we have been up to! We spent some time down in the maker space using our problem solving skills and discovering different way to create and show learning. These past few weeks have also been exciting because our Chromebooks are now ready to use. Our school now has 3 Chromebook carts that can be signed out for mobile computer lab space. Here we are using the Chromebooks to complete a webquest about Ellis Island during Social Studies. We also had Isabella's mom come back to join us as a mystery reader. There are still plenty of spots to sign up!! We had another spirit day and enjoyed a school day in our pajamas! Here we are during morning meeting all comfy cozy! We have also become very independent workers making great hard working decisions throughout our day. Literacy has become a great time in our day where we are working on reading and writing. We have been such hard workers as we completed our narrative writing unit and took our math benchmark that we also had a brain break with Go Noodle. We also had fun trying out the mannequin challenge! I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!
This week started off with Halloween! The class looked great in all their costumes, They wanted a nice picture and a silly picture so that's what we did! The teachers also had fun on Halloween! The day kicked off with some pumpkin math. We predicted, estimated, collected data, and graphed! Most importantly, we had fun! Thanks to all the parents for their donations and help! Next, we had a yummy snack and had fun celebrating the holiday. In the afternoon, we read a Halloween story by Jerry Seinfeld, it was pretty funny but true! Then we did a Halloween craft, keeping with our pumpkin theme! The class has been working very hard on their map projects for Social Studies. These projects put together everything we have learned in our map skills unit. We also got an exciting new collaboration white board table thanks to the MCPE! We have had so much fun using it this week. Today we had Caroline's mom as our mystery reader and she shared a wonderful choose your own adventure book. The students were very excited to be able to choose what happened next in the adventure. We did lots of exciting learning this week. In Science we continued our investigstion with magnets and learned what happens when steel or iron when it touches a magnet.
In reading we are continuing to dig deep into characters and really think about what evidence in the story helps us understand the character traits. In writing we are almost done with our final drafts of our narrative stories, and boy do we have some great writers in our class! Please check out your child's See Saw Digital portfolio as they worked hard to add meaningful learning this week. They took their own pictures, videos, and captures of their learning and worked on explaining their thinking. This year seems to be flying right by! Another month over! We started this week with a trip to the brand new Public Safety building. Officer Maganello gave us a great tour. Next we filled our marble jar and we were able to have our class reward. We enjoyed our "beach" day as we worked. We started a new investigation in science this week: magnets! We did some testing inside with different materials to see what type of materials would interact and stick to magnets. Then, we went outside and tested materials around the school. We were amazed by some of the items that stuck! In writers' workshop we have been working on revising and editing our work as well as peer conferencing! These narrative stories are turning out great and I am proud of all the hard work these students do! This week I wanted to share some fabulous are work brought in as a Halloween decoration for our class. We were all very impressed with Sonya's hard work! Today we enjoyed The Legend of Sleepy Hollow read by our mystery reader, Lila's mom! Thank you for helping us get in the Halloween spirit!
We started this week with a great math lesson from Mrs. Wells, our math specialist. She came to help us kick off some great strategies to use when multiplying multi-digit numbers. In reading, we are still working on characters and character traits. This week we spent time thinking if we could choose character traits by thinking about a character's actions. We have been using our Global Read Aloud, Pax by Sara Pennypacker, to start our conversations and practice. Here is a glimpse of our independent reading time, what are you reading? We are wrapping up our social studies unit on map skills with an independent project. Students are creating a treasure map of an island. Through this project the students are applying their learning of latitude and longitude, directions, map keys and symbols, oceans and land and many other skills we have been learning about. I would like to thank Jackson's dad, our Mystery Reader these week for a great wizard story, perfect for this time of year. The students are loving trying to guess who might be coming in! Last but not least, we have exciting news this week! We have had so many awesome days this year that we filled our marble jar and are ready for our reward. On Tuesday we will be having "beach day". Students may bring in a beach towel or small blanket to do their work on and wear sunglasses or hats. The kids have the opportunity to earn 2 letters for each subject in the day, to spell out "Awesome Day." At the end of the day we add up the number of letters and that's how much marbles go in the jar.
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Ms. MacDonaldWelcome to grade 4! Archives
February 2018
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