Quarter 4 is off to a great start! Students returned from Spring Break refreshed and ready. Here's some of what we were up to this past week:Exploring MATTER… Students observed, inferred, measured, discussed, constructed tables, recorded data, read, and wrote in science this week. Ask your child to share about the following hands-on experiences with you! -Predicting and Measuring Mass of classroom objects -Measuring the Volume of 5 different rocks -Smashing Crackers -Ice Cubes in a Bag Some questions to get you started: What tool did you use for measuring mass this week? How is this tool different from a pan balance? How did you measure the volume of each of the five rocks? Explain what you learned from the "Smashing Crackers" and "Ice Cubes in a Bag" labs. How did the results compare to your predictions? To help build background and review matter concepts from previous years, students watched two Study Jams episodes. New concepts were supported with reading about energy sources in small teacher-led groups as well as a culminating reading in the Science text book to bring understanding to the week's hands-on experiences. Next week, we will continue exploring matter and learning about heat energy. Informational Writing… This quarter students will be exploring the process and skills for writing to inform. This week during Writing Workshop, we began to get a sense of informational books. We brainstormed topics for our own books and began to imagine how we would organize or books and what features we would include to best inform our readers. Ask your child about his/her plans! Opinion Writing… Following a NEWSELA article titled, "Studies show homework isn't much of a burden," students were asked to write to the following prompt: Do 4th grade students have too much homework? This gave students a chance to show their ability to formulate a thesis statement and back up their opinion with details and evidence. We will share these next week! Response to Literature Writing… Students regularly write about their independent reading. This writing takes the form of a letter to me and allows students to choose about what they wish to share. Students are encouraged to discuss characters, theme, setting, point of view, and share signposts and how these signpost noticings affect their understanding of the story. The objective of the assignment is for students to share their thinking about their reading. "How does point of view affect how a story is told?" We took the entire week reading to uncover the answer to this question. We read and discussed multiple pieces of historical fiction---each about folks who joined a wagon train to move West. On Friday, students worked in small groups sharing the stories they read and how the main character felt about the move West. Students discussed who told the stories and how this affected their understanding and how the story was relayed to the reader. Finally, students collaborated to formulate a written answer to the question above citing multiple pieces of evidence from various pieces of text. Ask your child to share his/her learning with you!
1 Comment
Molly MacDonald
4/13/2014 10:59:07 am
Wow! Doing some great stuff! I love hearing about it on this blog!
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