End-of-Week Update, 9/26

What we've been up to:

Woosh!  There goes another “puff” as our Room 20 students huff and puff and blow their puff mobiles along!  (Don’t worry, no big bad wolves were involved in the creation of these puff mobiles.)  If you aren’t sure what a puff mobile looks like, check out the photos above and you can see our puff mobiles in person next week at Open House.  Our engineering teams are hard at work redesigning and testing to be sure the puff mobiles are ready for Tuesday's race!

At PE, we had fun outside on the hill while playing “Rescue.”  In health, we shared pictures with the class that were hung up on a poster.  We also asked kids in the class for signatures for questions like “Do you play an instrument?”  “La la la!” In music, we practiced playing our recorders.  We played a new song called the “B” song aka “All Alone.”  At library, we were all absent.  Art was cool this week with “cool” color watercolors (hahaha).  It was the backgrounds of our leaf printings.

This week, we teamed up with Miss Farrell’s class to do some Readers’ Theater and we also read some more of The Sisters Grimm which is a very interesting book!  The girls’ parents vanished from the face of the Earth!  We wrote journal entries during housekeeping.  We heard Emma’s book talk about Jack Russell Dog Detective, in which she told us about the book but didn’t give away any secrets. 

Room 20 students have been working very hard in writing.  We’ve been talking and writing about leads.  We’ve been talking about grabbing the readers’ attention and making them want to keep reading.  We’ve been using dialogue, thought shots, poems, descriptions of the setting / character, facts, action, and onomatopoeia to start the leads.  We started drafting our narrative stories and want to start publishing on Thursday.

On Monday, we did problem solving with multiplication and division.  We worked in teams and tried to use "math talk" in our groups to help us share our ideas and listen to others'.  On Tuesday, we reviewed for the math test.  On Wednesday we rocked our math test!  Some students earned chips completing extra work for studying!  Overall, we were relieved when we took the test because we felt ready and it wasn’t as bad as we were worrying!  Check out some pictures below of the problem solving work we've been doing in teams!  

You’re probably wondering how the puff mobile race is going to go, but you’ll have to wait until Open House to find out!

What's coming up:

• Open House is this coming Thursday, 10/2 6:30 - 8:30.  Be sure to leave plenty of time to check out Room 20 and the hard work we've been doing!
• Our trip to the Franklin Public Library will be on Friday, 10/3!

End-of-Week Update, 9/19

For word study this week, we came up with synonyms, or
 "shades of meaning" for our Wordly Wise words!

What we've been up to:
We are completing a special week of 4th grade filled with fun new activities like Len Cabral, word art, engineering with Mr. Adams, and finding out about Mrs. Adams' baby!  Listen up for all we did this week...

We had a special visit from storyteller Len Cabral since we all did such an awesome job doing our summer reading!  He was just as amazing as last year and told us some new stories.  We learned a lot about storytelling, and therefore writing, from Len Cabral.  We noticed that he chose interesting, unusual, and funny parts of his story to describe in great detail.  These descriptions made us really pay attention and we were able to make a movie in our minds as he was talking.  Secondly, we learned that it's okay to "embellish" a little when telling a story as long as it isn't too ridiculous.  Last, we learned that even stories that seem boring or ordinary can be really interesting if you tell them just right!  We came right back from Len Cabral's visit and did some storytelling of our own using our own stories.  We also created timelines of our stories to help us as we start drafting next week.  Check out the pictures / videos below of Len Cabral (and Room 20 storytellers) at work!

In science, we had a special treat this week!  Mr. Adams (Mrs. Adams' husband) came in to teach us all about engineering.  He is an electrical engineer and he builds circuits for lots of different radar systems!  He taught us about how important teamwork is and how engineers work together to follow the design process.  He also told us about our first engineering project - a wind-powered "puff mobile" that we'll build with our team and "puff" across the gym.  We met with our engineering teams and started coming up with plans that fit the requirements.  We'll start building next week - we can't wait!

Mr. Adams showed us this video about why engineers' jobs are so cool!

He also showed us this video from NASA about the engineering design process!

In reading, we have been continuing to read with an active mind.  We started our first read aloud book this week, The Sisters Grimm: The Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley.  We listened with active minds and already have a lot of questions and connections to the characters so far!  We're wondering what could have happened to Daphne and Sabrina's parents and want to find out more about their "grandmother."

We've been busy working with our Wordly Wise words - creating "word art" and thinking about "shades of meaning" (see picture above) with our words.  Next week, we'll spend some time sorting our words and changing them by adding different word parts!

In math, we've been continuing our work with multiplication and division.  We had the chance to play some multiplication fluency games (see pictures below) including "Buzz," "Multiplication War," "I Have, Who Has?" and more!  We learned some rules about "special quotients" involving zero and one and made "special news reports" about the rules.  We got a chance to be creative and show what we learned about division.  It was fun!

In music, we got our recorders!  Mrs. MacMurray taught us how to hold our recorders, how to blow into them, and how to play our first note - B!  We are excited to practice hard and earn our belts.  Also, in chorus Alex was named one of the first celebrity singers!  Go, Alex!  We had picture day on Thursday.  We also voted on whether or not we thought Mrs. Adams was going to have a boy or a girl baby.  We found out that most of us were right - the baby is a girl!  We think she should name her Dory...

Yay, Alex!  First celebrity singer of the year in chorus!

Stay tuned to our blog for more updates coming soon!

What's coming up:

• Open House is Thursday, 10/2 from 6:30 - 8:30 PM here at JFK - mark your calendars!  We're already hard at work on some projects and work that we'll be showcasing that night.
• There is no school next Thursday, 9/25 in observance of Rosh Hashana.
• Our field trip to the Franklin Public Library is scheduled for Friday, 10/3!  More information and permission slips will be going home soon.  

October Conference Sign-Up

It was so nice to meet many of you at the parent curriculum afternoon yesterday!  As I mentioned, a link for a sign-up for October conferences should be emailed out by Sign-Up Genius soon.  Here is the link for the sign-up in case you don't receive an email from me.

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0448aba92ca64-october

Stay tuned to our blog for more updates, photos, videos, and more towards the end of the week!

End-of-Week Update, 9/12

What we've been up to:
Our first week (and a half) of school have been awesome!  We met Mrs. Adams, learned about Dory's important motto "JUST KEEP SWIMMING!!" and we've gotten to work on a lot of things including math, reading, writing, and science!

In math, we've been mastering (WW word!!!) our multiplication facts and learning about properties of multiplication like the Identity, Commutative, Zero, and Distributive Properties!  We are playing new games and working hard to get used to our new EnVisions math materials.  Check out some photos of us completing a fun "Math About Me" activity on the very first day of school!

In reading, we've been focusing on choosing / reading "just right" books with Mrs. Adams.  We have started to choose books for our book bags and using the 5-finger test to make sure they're "just right."  We also worked with friends from Miss Farrell's class to read some fun read alouds of fairy tales!  We learned how point-of-view makes a big difference when telling a story.  Third person point of view is when a narrator (not one of the characters) tells the story and first person point of view is when one of the characters in the story tells what's happening using "I," "me," and "my."  We read The Three Little Pigs in both first and third person points of view and we wrote our own first person point of view version of Sleeping Beauty in cooperative "mixed up" groups with our friends in Room 21 after hearing the third person version!  It was fun to tell the story from the evil fairy's, the prince's, or Sleeping Beauty's point of view.  Check out some videos and photos of our cooperative group work below!

In writing, we have been showing off all we know about the writing process and how to tell a good story that captivates our readers!  We kicked things off with using photos to share some of our summer stories.  Stay tuned for more narrative writing in the next few weeks!

In science, we started our first unit - weather!  So far, we've shared our own interesting (or scary) weather stories and learned a bit about the water cycle.  Soon, we'll be building terrariums to help us observe the water cycle up close - we can't wait!

We also started Wordly Wise - a vocabulary word study packet that we'll complete for homework each night.  We learned 15 words this week including "master," "develop," and "lack."  We've already been spotting WW words in our books this week!

We have had all 5 specials (some of them twice!) and we've been hard at work already!  We have music homework due Wednesday and are looking forward to learning the recorder this year.  We created "earthworks" in Art on Friday out of natural materials.  Even though they're temporary, Mrs. Hess took photos to capture our creativity!  Check them out below!

Stay tuned for next week's update!