Fabulous in Fourth!: Weekly Update

It was a pleasure to share our learning with families this week at Open House. The students were proud to show off all of their hard work so far.

Math:

We began Topic 1 multiplication and division and its meaning this week. Lessons this week focused on multiplication strategies, properties, and array models. Students are learning strategies for remembering or efficiently determining multiplication facts within 12 x 12. Today we talked about how you can use the distributive property to split on of the factors in a problem like 9 x 8 into easier factors. Students used this method in way that worked for the facts sets they know well.

Ex: 9 x 8 can be written as (4 x 8) + ( 5 x 8)

Reader's Workshop:

This week we finished our introduction to story elements. Students learned how to find the theme or author's message of the book by looking at how the characters change throughout the story. Together as a class we identified several messages that we can use in our own lives from the book The Bad Case of the Stripes by David Shannon. Students felt that David Shannon is encouraging us to be ourselves and not to worry about what other people think. This week we also read The Widow's Broom by Chris Van Allsburg, to help us practice inferring. Students learned to combine evidence from the text and their schema (background knowledge) to develop ideas about the story. We talked about how determining character traits and theme are inferences that require us to look for evidence from the text as well as use our background knowledge.

Writer's Workshop:

Now that students have drafted their narrative story ideas, we are working on revision strategies to make their writing better, a process that all writers go through. This week we focus on first identifying the internal (feelings and thoughts) and external (actions, dialogue) events in our stories and mentor stories. We determined that a balance of both internal and external events creates the best story. Most students found that the internal events in their story were weaker than their external events, so we worked to revise and add more internal events.

Science:

This week we continued to study weather. Students learned all about the different weather instruments or tools used to measure weather. We also created our much anticipated terrariums. We will be making observations daily to see if we can see evidence of the water cycle in our terrariums. In Project Based Learning this Friday students began their weather station challenge. Students are challenged to work in collaborative groups to design and build a weather station that measures two different weather phenomena. Students will use their knowledge of the weather tools to complete this project in the coming weeks. Students will then get to put their weather station to the test, and collect data about the weather.