Thanks for meeting with us over these past few weeks! We have enjoyed getting together as a team and finding areas where we can continue to support these amazing learners!
This week we've embarked on an exciting journey! We are developing projects which we feel we have a voice/passion for to investigate and to communicate about. It's exciting to see our SBLC citizens thinking about a deep question and how they can research, innovate, and inspire change.
In ELA, we've moved forward with our analysis of character in that we are nearing the climax of the book. We've been examining our character's actions and noticed that changes are happening, yet our author, Tom Rogers, has left us with enough unknowns to keep us wondering. With that, it is essential that we cite text evidence to support our ideas, thinking, and further questions. We are walking through each piece together as guided practice, and then challenged to take these skills into our independent reading. It's so exciting when a reader comes over and shows another reader areas where they've discovered and thought about new understandings through signposts or make connections with their books!
In writing, we are more independently using paragraph form to express our expository ideas. We are using our text, Eleven, to help us with topics, as we are extremely invested in our character and his experiences. We have expanded our sentence analysis to compound sentences, and are learning the new "ways commas work" (the rules of usage).
Developing a questioning stance and knowing our nonfiction sources and perspective is the focus of our Social Studies work. As we are reading, we know that this is a writer's version of the facts, and knowing there are other angles that this may be expressed gives us a greater understanding. Good historians READ WIDELY about topics, using primary sources and several perspectives to learn about events. It's exciting to hear them wonder, critique, and question, instead of simply ingest and memorize. History comes alive this way!
It's been a short, busy week in math and science! 4th graders added and subtracted decimals and we all continue to build schema for multiplication. 3rd graders are finishing up their skip counting resources and thinking about efficient, flexible ways to multiply by 6 and 7. I love the picture below of two third graders sharing their pathway for 14x7. We had some fantastic number talks about how to decompose 7 into 5 and 2 so we could calculate mentally or on paper.
As scientists, we started to explore energy this week. We know that energy can be classified as either kinetic or potential and that energy is the ability to do work or cause change. We worked as physicists today to investigate how different amounts of potential energy caused rubber bands to travel different distances. We also used marbles (spheres) to investigate how kinetic energy can transfer between objects. We used math as a tool to measure distance and to explain the patterns of motion that we observed.
Next Tuesday, 4th grade is going on a field trip to the Zach Scott Theater. Sack lunches will be necessary, and we can dress appropriate for the theater since we won't have our class T Shirts by then. If your child wants to bring a change of clothes, that's great too.
Enjoy your weekend!
Jen and Jewellyn
This week we've embarked on an exciting journey! We are developing projects which we feel we have a voice/passion for to investigate and to communicate about. It's exciting to see our SBLC citizens thinking about a deep question and how they can research, innovate, and inspire change.
In ELA, we've moved forward with our analysis of character in that we are nearing the climax of the book. We've been examining our character's actions and noticed that changes are happening, yet our author, Tom Rogers, has left us with enough unknowns to keep us wondering. With that, it is essential that we cite text evidence to support our ideas, thinking, and further questions. We are walking through each piece together as guided practice, and then challenged to take these skills into our independent reading. It's so exciting when a reader comes over and shows another reader areas where they've discovered and thought about new understandings through signposts or make connections with their books!
In writing, we are more independently using paragraph form to express our expository ideas. We are using our text, Eleven, to help us with topics, as we are extremely invested in our character and his experiences. We have expanded our sentence analysis to compound sentences, and are learning the new "ways commas work" (the rules of usage).
Developing a questioning stance and knowing our nonfiction sources and perspective is the focus of our Social Studies work. As we are reading, we know that this is a writer's version of the facts, and knowing there are other angles that this may be expressed gives us a greater understanding. Good historians READ WIDELY about topics, using primary sources and several perspectives to learn about events. It's exciting to hear them wonder, critique, and question, instead of simply ingest and memorize. History comes alive this way!
It's been a short, busy week in math and science! 4th graders added and subtracted decimals and we all continue to build schema for multiplication. 3rd graders are finishing up their skip counting resources and thinking about efficient, flexible ways to multiply by 6 and 7. I love the picture below of two third graders sharing their pathway for 14x7. We had some fantastic number talks about how to decompose 7 into 5 and 2 so we could calculate mentally or on paper.
Next Tuesday, 4th grade is going on a field trip to the Zach Scott Theater. Sack lunches will be necessary, and we can dress appropriate for the theater since we won't have our class T Shirts by then. If your child wants to bring a change of clothes, that's great too.
Enjoy your weekend!
Jen and Jewellyn
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