Weekly Update

Math: After students learning about patterns in our math minilesson, students worked on finishing their fact fluency games. They have worked on planning, designing, and creating these games over the last few weeks. Finally, students had a chance to try out another group's game, What a great way to continue to practice our math facts! 

Writer's Workshop:

The week students focused in on the planning stage of the writing process. After reviewing their journals for ideas, students developed a fictional story idea. This week students learned about planning the sequence of the story using a Story Mountain Map. Students were asked to think carefully about which event would be the top of the mountain, aka the heart of their story. Finally, students practiced using planning boxes to plan out the specific way they will write each event. We know good writers add dialogue, small action, the character's thoughts and feelings, and visual description using the 5 senses. We look forward to revising these stories next week. 

Social Studies:

In social studies we traveled to Mexico! Students are learning all about the geography, history, and climate of Mexico. We will continue our travels next week by learning about special Mexican traditions. 

 Dancers of the Week 

Weekly Update

This Tuesday students excitedly participated in their Puff Mobile race, the culminating activity for our Puff Mobile project. Students reflected on the Engineering Design Process used to build their Puff Mobile. We also reflected on the teamwork, perseverance, and collaboration it took for groups to be successful. 

Weekly Update

This week, fourth graders were treated to a presentation about the Natives of the Northeast, and about archaeology.  Students participated in an "archaeological dig" right at JFK.  Mrs. Silvia, of the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University, brought real artifacts, and explained to the students how archaeologists find artifacts and estimate their age.  We look forward to learning more from this program throughout the year.  Thank you to the JFK PCC for funding this awesome experience!

Giving book talks is part of Reader's Workshop in 4th grade. Students practice speaking skills and help others find interesting books to read. 

Students sharing books they love!        

Dancers of the Week

Weekly Update

Despite the short week together, we had a lot of exciting learning opportunities!

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.

Sharing completed math projects for Unit 3 and 4!

Writers' Workshop: As a class we read Alma and How She Got Her Name  by Juana Martinez-Neal, in the story Alma shares the meaning behind her name. Students then developed interview questions to research their own name story. After gathering information for their own name story, students worked to write a paragraph with varying sentence structure. We are looking forward to revising and sharing these name stories next week!

Science: Students continued to work in collaborative groups on Puff Mobiles. Today we made terrariums as an introduction to our explorations of the water cycle and earths' processes. Later in the year we will use our terrariums to investigate plant adaptations.

Connecting science and math to measure the distance our Puff Mobiles traveled using the metric system:

Social Studies: Students continued to learn about maps and globes by focusing in on using latitude and longitude to find and identify exact places on earth. A study guide for the first social studies assessment of the year will go home last Friday. Students are encouraged to study a little each night by making flash cards, making a quiz, or creating a game, or using the resources on the blog.

Reader's Workshop:

We had a special packaged delivered to 4th grade students on Wednesday! In this package students found some penguins and our next 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. Students made new goals for the next 6 weeks of reader's workshop. Ask your child what they are tracking to increase their understanding of the story!

Sharing Books we love through book talks in Reader's Workshop:

A special thank you from our Author visit last week, Thank you Amy Nielander!