Topic 4 began this week with the exploration of mental math. Students practiced a variety of strategies to add and subtract mentally. On Tuesday we used rounding to estimate sums and differences, and Thursday students looked carefully at strategies for adding larger numbers accurately.
Writer's Workshop
We officially began writer's workshop this week with a special guest. Len Cabral came and share stories with us as we kicked out our year of writing. Our first lesson in writer's workshop this week focused on generating narrative story ideas. We talked about how important people, places, and things can be a sources for our story ideas as well. Some of our next lessons focused on making sure our ideas are "seed" ideas not "watermelon" ideas so that we can zoom in on them with detail and tell the story step-by-step (just like Len Cabral did).
Constitution Day
We celebrated Constitution Day (Monday 9/17) as a grade students learned about what the Constitution is and why it is so important to us. We also developed a class Constitution together, by first looking back at the question students answered on the first day of school and developing a short list of rules that we will need to follow. Each student signed their name to these rules "ratifying" it as a class constitution.
Science/ PBL
We kicked off science this week with our Engineers in Residence! Two engineers (one a former Kennedy ladybug!) visited 4th grade to introduce the Engineering Design Process and to tell us about what engineers do on a daily basis. Students have been assigned their first engineering task of the year: to design a wind powered Puff Mobile. Students had a chance to apply their cooperative group skills that we reviewed and practiced last week in a new group task. After identifying the problem and brainstorming ideas, groups began to illustrate a detailed plan before building.
Students practice effectively collaborative communication: each student has a chance to share his/her idea while group member listen and respond.
We kicked off science this week with our Engineers in Residence! Two engineers (one a former Kennedy ladybug!) visited 4th grade to introduce the Engineering Design Process and to tell us about what engineers do on a daily basis. Students have been assigned their first engineering task of the year: to design a wind powered Puff Mobile. Students had a chance to apply their cooperative group skills that we reviewed and practiced last week in a new group task. After identifying the problem and brainstorming ideas, groups began to illustrate a detailed plan before building.
Our Engineer in Residence meeting with students to discuss their ideas on how to solve the problem.
Students practice effectively collaborative communication: each student has a chance to share his/her idea while group member listen and respond.
Dancers of the Week
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