BizTown
By now you've probably heard all about it, but have you seen the pictures? Click to see the full album. BizTown truly would not have been possible without the terrific support of our parent volunteers. We had 33 parents in all, who attended a 2-hour training session in February, then arrived an hour before us at BizTown, and facilitated the experience for students the rest of the day. I'd like to especially thank our class' parent volunteers for their help:
- Luvlee Lee, Mariner's Team Store
- Brianna Eigner, Tacoma Water
- Mark Shields, Puget Sound Energy
- Kim Mitzel, Staples
- Mike Purdon, Chase Bank
- Christina Anagnostopoulos, SuperGraphics
- Kristine Hannley, UPS
- Heather Kearns, Q13 Fox News
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| Students were excited and amazed, to say the least as they first walked in to BizTown. It's like the Disneyland of Economics. |
- Nearly finished with Unit 8. Students will finish/study the review sheet over the weekend. They should also complete any unfinished pages in their math journal for Unit 8. Test on Monday
- Learned to find the area and perimeter of figures. Learned formulas for area of rectangles and parallelograms (bxh=area -- base x height = area). And we learned that a triangle is 1/2(bxh) because if you take two triangles of the same size, rotate, and plug them together you have a parallelogram. Thus we need to take 1/2 of bxh so that we're only talking about area for one triangle--not two.
- Started matter unit. Charted similarities and differences of solids, liquids, and gasses on a venn diagram. We drew on our observations of mystery balloons which contained different types of matter--ask your student about this.
- Tuesday we dropped everything and did a 4th grade science rotation day. Throughout the day students rotated to each of the five fourth grade classes for a different lesson on matter. Among other things, students learned about volume, how gas takes up space, how different shapes still weight and take up the same space, and more.
- Conducted a class-wide evaporation experiment. Ask your student what container evaporated most/least. Students began designing their own evaporation experiments in groups
- Started a new read aloud. Ask your student what's happened so far with Miranda. What lessons can we learn from the characters in this story that we can apply to our narrative writing stories?
- Practiced some more with lifting a line
- Worked on a new reading response strategy involving visualizing what we read, called "leaning in"
- Began an exciting new writing unit on realistic fiction narrative writing
- Learned that ideas can come from past entries in our writing, thinking about people we've encountered & experiences we've had
- Began to brainstorm the outside (external features) and inside (internal features) of our characters
- Learned that stories generally have characters who want something and struggle in some way. Often wants and struggles are connected somehow. And our job as writers is to show wants/struggles through our story, but not just come right out and tell this. (Show, not tell)
