We blinked, and it is March!
This week, 4th grade had another field trip to the Paramount Theater downtown. We enjoyed a wonderful musical about Jane Goodall based on the book, Me...Jane. The performers were entertaining as well as talented. We were in the nosebleeds, but there wasn't a bad seat in the house!
We've been gathering data from other classrooms at Kiker about their choice on a playground remodel. We wrote the final proposals on Friday and sent them to Mr. Crissey. We are excited to see this come to fruition!
In ELA, we've been building stamina in analyzing sentences for accuracy. Remembering our AAAWWUBBIS dependent clauses, independent clauses, conjunctions, commas...it's a lot of work, but we are able to confidently create correct sentences as well as recognize what's inaccurate in sentences too. We finally had a full week, and spelling centers are back in full swing.
We are getting to know our characters well in our book, Out of My Mind. We are interacting with text and investing in Melody's life. We met Melody's classmates through her eyes. She described some behaviors and habits that have us looking at people with differences in a new light. We are curious and asking questions to get to know them and understand them. They are not defined by their diagnosis, they are Melody's friends. It's neat to see our reading community opening up and seeing everyone as created perfectly imperfect. They are seeing talking boards, wheelchairs, and earphones as tools to help people communicate and operate in the world, not things people need because they are "broken." Such amazing lessons and fabulous awareness.
In addition to preferences about the playground redesign, we also collected SBLC data about screen time preferences and daily minutes. This led to greater awareness as we looked at the range of data and converted our time between hours and minutes. Our data collection also led to conversations about using screen time by ourselves, with friends online, or with friends in person and how these shape our screen experience. All of our data was represented in the five types of graphs that we need to be experts in as 3rd and 4th graders: frequency tables, dot plots, pictographs, bar graphs, and stem-and-leaf plots. Our graph paper notebooks have been put to good use!
We're moving from statistics to geometry over the next few weeks. We know that polygons are 2-dimensional shapes with 3 or more straight sides. Just introducing this definition led to some fabulous productive disagreements where many of us deepened our understanding and awareness of shape attributes. So far we've focused mainly on parallel and perpendicular lines, right angles, and names of the triangle and quadrilateral family. This is a lot of vocabulary to process and remember, so we're enjoying lots of hands-on experiences, lots of drawing/color-coding, and lots of solving puzzles to construct our understanding.
SBLC scientists moved from our soil inquiry to understanding our dynamic Earth through the story of its rocks. We talked about volcanic rock this week, considering how heat and pressure create different types of volcanoes and different types of rocks. We've enjoyed messy labs simulating different types of lava, gathering evidence for why they form different types of volcanoes, and stating our claims to our community of scientists.
Enjoy the weekend!
Jen and Jewellyn
We've been gathering data from other classrooms at Kiker about their choice on a playground remodel. We wrote the final proposals on Friday and sent them to Mr. Crissey. We are excited to see this come to fruition!
In ELA, we've been building stamina in analyzing sentences for accuracy. Remembering our AAAWWUBBIS dependent clauses, independent clauses, conjunctions, commas...it's a lot of work, but we are able to confidently create correct sentences as well as recognize what's inaccurate in sentences too. We finally had a full week, and spelling centers are back in full swing.
We are getting to know our characters well in our book, Out of My Mind. We are interacting with text and investing in Melody's life. We met Melody's classmates through her eyes. She described some behaviors and habits that have us looking at people with differences in a new light. We are curious and asking questions to get to know them and understand them. They are not defined by their diagnosis, they are Melody's friends. It's neat to see our reading community opening up and seeing everyone as created perfectly imperfect. They are seeing talking boards, wheelchairs, and earphones as tools to help people communicate and operate in the world, not things people need because they are "broken." Such amazing lessons and fabulous awareness.
In addition to preferences about the playground redesign, we also collected SBLC data about screen time preferences and daily minutes. This led to greater awareness as we looked at the range of data and converted our time between hours and minutes. Our data collection also led to conversations about using screen time by ourselves, with friends online, or with friends in person and how these shape our screen experience. All of our data was represented in the five types of graphs that we need to be experts in as 3rd and 4th graders: frequency tables, dot plots, pictographs, bar graphs, and stem-and-leaf plots. Our graph paper notebooks have been put to good use!
We're moving from statistics to geometry over the next few weeks. We know that polygons are 2-dimensional shapes with 3 or more straight sides. Just introducing this definition led to some fabulous productive disagreements where many of us deepened our understanding and awareness of shape attributes. So far we've focused mainly on parallel and perpendicular lines, right angles, and names of the triangle and quadrilateral family. This is a lot of vocabulary to process and remember, so we're enjoying lots of hands-on experiences, lots of drawing/color-coding, and lots of solving puzzles to construct our understanding.
SBLC scientists moved from our soil inquiry to understanding our dynamic Earth through the story of its rocks. We talked about volcanic rock this week, considering how heat and pressure create different types of volcanoes and different types of rocks. We've enjoyed messy labs simulating different types of lava, gathering evidence for why they form different types of volcanoes, and stating our claims to our community of scientists.
Enjoy the weekend!
Jen and Jewellyn
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