This week was one big event after another, it seems! I am finishing up grading and working on report cards this morning, so I am going to let your small people fill you in on all the details. Here are some conversation starters: Tell me about your trip to Cassano's! What did you see? What surprised you? What was the coolest thing you learned? **Make sure you check out the previous blog post for pictures from our trip! iMovie Wonder book trailers...Who did you work with? Tell me how you chose to highlight the themes of this book. How did you make the trailer? **I will be loading these trailers on to this blog next week so that you can see them all. They are FABULOUS! Mystery Party...What mystery did you work to solve? Who were the suspects? Did you solve the mystery correctly? What did you enjoy the most? Long Division...We are up to three digit dividends and one digit divisors. Quotients are at times whole numbers, and at other times remainders reported as fractions. Ask your child to show you what they know and teach you the song/dance we learned to help us remember the process for solving long division problems. Immigration Unit...Ask your child to tell you how to define an immigrant. Ask him/her about the books he/she is reading presently and about the books he/she will be reading. Ask him/her to share with you how he/she is documenting his/her thinking. Harmanize...Ask your child to tell you about the Harmanize event on Friday. Ask your child about the French and sign language he/she learned and about the foods he/she tasted! So I sent an email to Wonder author RJ Palacio. I wanted to share the class comments about her book so she would know how much we enjoyed reading and discussing Wonder. Below is her response to me:
2 Comments
So happy to see all of my little charges back in school and ready to learn! We were very busy this week wrapping things up and tying bows on projects and units we worked on prior to the break. The end of the second quarter is January 18th, so I will be getting final grades and assessments into order for report cards over the next week. Report cards will be sent home in backpacks on January 25th. Below is a recap of our week! MATH: We used the first two days back for review of skills. Wednesday we began Unit 6 in our Everyday Math books. This unit will cover strategies for division, rotations, angles, and coordinate grid systems. Family Letters for this unit were sent home in backpacks this week, but if it didn't make it home, please check here: MATH! A Mid-Year Assessment was given to students in my math class this week as well. After looking these assessments over, I will be sending home extra practice with your child should I think some extra repetition would be of help. Students completed their final blog post for the second quarter this week! Students have been working from a Blog Choice Board. A variety of topics and writing forms were available from which to choose and write. Next week, students will decide which piece from this quarter will be taken through a final revision and turned in for a grade. We began our Economics Unit this week and are exploring the factors of production. Students will be participating in a variety of fun group activities for this unit and are looking forward to our upcoming trip to Cassano's Pizza. Ask your child about the following terms: scarcity, labor, entrepreneurship We brought our reading of Wonder to an end this week! We finished up with some final writing about the book's themes, how August's character changes throughout the story, about how this book affected us each personally. Students did a wonderful job supporting their thoughts and opinions with evidence from the text. Additionally, each student chose a precept and created a poster for hanging on their personal bulletin board. I loved reading these and the students enjoyed sharing them with their classmates. On Friday, we broke out into small groups and used our knowledge of theme to create book trailers for Wonder using iMovie on the iPads. We will finish these projects up at the beginning of next week. Enjoy the excerpts from 4W writing below... Some final thoughts from learners in 4W after reading Wonder:This book inspired me to be the best friend I can be.
I learned that whenever I have a bad day, I have hope in the next one. This book inspired me to go out into the world and make some new and fun and exciting friends! It made me so frustrated to see all those kids being so mean to Auggie. I think they should make this a movie! This book inspired me to make a club for fundraising for the Ronald McDonald House and giving the money to people who need surgeries that cannot afford it. It made me think to stand up more and be myself. This book inspired me to be a little nicer to everyone. I like how they made a song for each person. It gave me an inference about what the story was going to be about. I really enjoyed this book because at the beginning, Auggie thought nobody would like him. At the end, everybody was his friend. I liked the message. You should just be yourself, no matter what your appearance is. I really liked this book because it taught me a very important lesson to not judge a person by how they look or how their hair is. You should like them on how big their heart is. It taught me a lot about treating others the way I want to be treated. I love this book because it is about a boy that is different. I feel for him. I love this book because it gets you frustrated and messes with your emotions. I definitely learned something from reading this book. I think it was very good at saying, “It’s not about the outside, it’s about the inside.” It was really funny, exciting, and a little bit sad. You can get a lot out of this book. I learned that everyone is different in a special way. I learned that you should be friends with anyone no matter what they look like. I learned that you should not be afraid to try something new. So hard to believe that November is here! We have been very busy in our classroom with all of our reading, writing, thinking, discussing, creating, researching, and reflecting. Team 4W is off to a wonderful start this second quarter! More specifically: READING/WRITING: We continue to read Wonder. We have met so many interesting characters and have learned so much more about each of them as the perspective of the narrator continues to change in this book. Students are keeping a Wonder Journal and stop to write frequently. Ask your child to share this with you! One of my favorite discussion points throughout this novel is Auggie's teacher, Mr. Browne's, use of precepts. These are "rules about really important things." As students in the book discuss the meaning of each precept, we are doing the same in our classroom. Here are a few we have discussed: “If you have the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind.” "Your deeds are your monuments." "Fortune favors the bold." Ask your child to share with you what he/she feels are the meanings behind these words. Next, ask them why this precept fits in or is important to the story. The topic of last week's Reader's Response was Character. Students were asked to choose a character from their independent reading books and describe the character in depth using character traits and justifying their opinions with examples from the text. Non-fiction reading was also a focus last week. As we studied our Constitution, students wrote summaries of their reading after first locating the main idea and supporting details. Additionally, students used two different iPad apps to research a president. Students gathered notes from both resources, and then used their information to make a fact poster. Our Internet Workshop time was used for exploring how a bill becomes a law. Again, students used a digital resource and practiced their note taking skills. SOCIAL STUDIES: We are in the midst of our Government Unit. What an exciting time to study this! In addition to what has been explained above, students have created flip books to show the responsibilities of each branch of government, learned what it takes to make it to the White House through an interactive bulletin board activity, and watched an interview with President Obama about the Constitution. Next week, we will be taking a closer look at the Bill of Rights and how they came to be. MATH: Unit 4 focuses on Decimals. Last week we reviewed place value and how to read and write decimals. Decimal place value can be very tricky. We will continue to practice, practice, practice! Just a reminder that the Everyday Math Family Letter can be very helpful for helping your child at home. If a copy of this did not make it home, click here. EVERYBODY COUNTS: We had our Everybody Counts Program last Monday! Thank you to the parents who took the time to bring this disability awareness program to our classroom. SELF ASSESSMENT: I am so proud of students in 4W for their thoughtful use of self-assessments. Students uses these weekly to reflect on three different learning targets across the curriculum. This is a time for them to show what they know and also be very clear about what they do not know or understand so we can work together to get them to a place of understanding. Students also self assess their collaborative group skills and set goals for how they can better work with others. In math, students use a self assessment tool to help them focus their study time prior to taking a test. Next week, the learners in 4W will use a tool to help them determine where they are in the Discovery Quest Project process. Students will use this tool to assist them in small group discussion on Thursday at our first Kids' Inquiry Conference. “Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion, to greatness.” ― R.J. Palacio, Wonder Last weekend, I sat down to read a book that had been recommended to me by an author friend of mine. I was so inspired by the characters, theme, author's craft, and by how it changed me, that I just knew it was a book that needed to be shared and explored with my fourth graders. And so here we are! We began reading Wonder this week. But before we did any reading, we did a little listening. R.J. Palacio tells the story of August Pullman through different characters' perspectives throughout the book. We meet August first, and his section opens with a quote from Natalie Merchant's song, Wonder. We watched the music video below and used the lyrics to help us make predictions about the story. Students identified important phrases from the song and made some excellent observations, predictions, and asked some very thoughtful questions. We have now read through page 16 and the class is hooked. Courage, compassion, and friendship are at this book's heart. This will certainly be an exciting reading journey! |
AuthorS
|