It has been a quick but busy week and I’m sure we are all eager for our holiday weekend! We sure are having a blast in our 4th grade classroom and I can’t wait for the fun activities we have ahead of us. I was so pleased to see respectful and responsible students in our room all week. Thank for your continued discussion on how to make our classroom and school a positive and fun place to learn. Here is our weekly update:
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| Volume. Building and visualizing a square meter. It would take 1000 decimeter cubes (10x10x10cm cubes like the yellow one pictured) to fill this space--or 1,000,000 cm cubes. |
Math:
- This week students took their Unit 11 Everyday Math assessment. These came home earlier in the week.
- We are now on to Unit 12! The focus of this unit is rates and how they are used in the real world.
- In two weeks we will be finished with our Everyday Math curriculum and will take our End of the Year Assessment
- Use this link to access the Unit 12 Family Letter.
- We finished our read aloud mystery genre book: From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Be sure to get the scoop from your student. Also, how did the author use what she knew to write the book?
- Read and discussed a book about the properties of air
- Studied five exemplary short stories and have been reading deeply and writing about them (more about this under writing)
Writing:
- We’re well in to our final unit of the year: Literary Essays (writing essays about great literature)
- Students have been carefully/deeply reading and responding to one or more of the five short stories in their packet: “Marble Champ,” “Fly Away Home,” “Eleven,” “Birthday Box,” and “Boar Out There.”
- Some of what we’ve learned:
- Strategies for writing in response to reading
- Asking questions to help interpret stories
- Thinking like an expert about characters
- Writing from inside a story
- Questions writers ask of a thesis statement
- Students will soon craft a thesis and at least two supporting points about one of the stories
- Ask your student what story they’re gravitating toward. See if you can help them express a thesis idea. A good frame for this is: At first glance _____ is a story about (external events that happen in the story), but I’ve come to realize it’s actually a story about (internal events that happen in the story). For example: At first glance “Spaghetti” by Cynthia Rylant is a story about boy named Gabriel who finds a cat, but I’ve come to realize it’s actually a story about a lonely boy who finds love.
Science:
- Our “Properties of Air” list keeps growing! Ask your student to describe how we learned each of these properties through scientific investigations we conducted:
- Air takes up space
- Warm air expands & rises
- Cool air contracts & falls
- Air has mass
- Air pressure. It affects weather
- Air exerts pressure
- We also made small scale barometers in the classroom to measure the air pressure and decide if we finally have any fair weather coming our way. We are not sure the outcome yet.
