Readers' Workshop: This week students participated in our first interactive read aloud of the year, Mighty Jack by Ben Hatke. We focused on learning and practicing strategies to read and understand a graphic novel. Students also choose an individual goal to improve their reading comprehension. Mighty Jack is a high interest, action-packed adventure that we all enjoyed! Many students are looking forward to reading the next two books in the series independently.
Writer's Workshop: This week students learned strategies for generating small moment story ideas. Students explored strong emotions such as worried, embarrassed, and hope to help identify true events for story writing. We also practiced using a planning strategy called a "sequence frame" to help us plan out the events in a story.
Students participated in their first SKYPE visit of the school year a few weeks back. 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 narrative stories this month.
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.
Social Studies: 4th Grade "traveled" to Mexico this week to continue our study of geography. Students worked to label the states of Mexico on a map and at the end of the week they learned all about the Day of the Dead, a Mexican celebration on November 1st and 2nd.
Science: In Science, we finished up our Animal and Plant Adaptation unit by investigating the interior and exterior structures that help plants and animals to survive.
