Room 21 Update

Today we celebrated world SMILE :) day by wearing Smile stickers and wearing Ladybug Kindness Medals created after our author SKYPE last week. 

This week's winners of the "disco ball" during dance party Friday!

Math: We are well into Topic 1 Multiplication and Division: Meanings and Facts. This week we focused our lessons on the meaning of multiplication and strategies for finding the product of different facts efficiently. Students used skip counting to find multiples of 2 and 5. Also, students analyzed the patterns in the multiples of 9 and learned a quick trick using their fingers for 9's facts. Yesterday students used the strategy "break apart" to quickly find products of 3,4,6,7,and 8's facts. 

Reader's Workshop:

We had a special packaged delivered during our 4th grade community meeting on Monday! 

In this package students found a penguin and our first interactive read aloud of the year: Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater. This week students learned routines for interactive read alouds during reader's workshop. While reading this book together as a class, students will practice tracking narrative elements and asking "talk worthy questions".

Writer's Workshop: This week students drafted their narrative stories after completing detailed planning using story mountain maps and planning boxes. In planning boxes students carefully planned where they would add action, thought shots, vivid description, feelings, and dialogue to help tell the story step-by-step. 

Science: Students continued to work in collaborative groups on Puff Mobiles. We also started our first science unit on weather. We began by discussing the water cycle, and participating in different observations of the water cycle in action.

Social Studies: Students continued to learn about maps and globes by focusing in on intermediate directions on the compass rose and practicing using the map scale to determine the distance between two places on a map. 

SKYPE:

Students participated in their first SKYPE visit of the school year. This first SKYPE was a "chat" with author of The LadyBug Race,  Amy Nielander. She shared with us the steps she took in writing the wordless pictures book, including sharing her inspiration for the book. Students were able to take this presentation and relate it to their own work in writing personal narrative stories this month.