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Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Mid Week Update, 9/23

Engineers are cool!


We've been busy here in Room 20!

We are storytellers.  Len Cabral, professional storyteller, visited Kennedy last week and shared some amazing stories with us!  We especially loved his "story in a story" and were so inspired that we came back and wrote some stories of our own!  We'll be writing more and more stories in Writers Workshop over the next few weeks.  So far, we're working on making our notebooks all about us!  We've added "I Am..." word splashes and used our summer photos to create thought and speech bubbles inspired from our snapshots!  We've acted out stories, too.  Stay posted for more narrative awesomeness!




We are engineers.  Mr. Adams, Mrs. Adams' husband, came in last Friday to help us kick off our first engineering project!  He showed us a couple of cool videos (above and below) to help us understand the many different problems that all kinds of engineers solve.  He explained that no matter the problem or task, engineers all follow the engineering design process, a series of steps from understanding the problem to research, building models to testing, redesigning to communicating your idea to others!  Mr. Adams gave us some tips from one engineer to another and the most important was to cooperate as a team and use everybody's talents and skills to make the best solution possible.  We started by restating the problem in our own words and sketching lots of possible ways to build our puff mobiles.  Next, we began building from our designs and testing along the way!  Check back next week for photos and results of the annual Grade 4 Puff Mobile Race!



NASA Engineering for Kids Video





We are teachers.  We worked with a small team to teach each other 3 new Wordly Wise words this week!  Mrs. Adams called it "Wordly Wise Theater."  It was a fun way to learn our words for the week.  We are working hard on paying attention to parts of speech, synonyms and antonyms, and word usage.



We are readers and thinkers.  We've been sharing our thinking as we read independently and as we start our first read aloud book, The Sisters Grimm!  Reading logs at home are going well!  Mrs. Adams reminded us to be specific and thoughtful as we share our thinking in our logs each night. 

Everybody has worked with Mrs. Adams to choose "just right" books!




 
We are mathematicians.  Mrs. Adams is so proud of our work with place value, especially our perseverance and attention to detail we showed during our first quiz!  On to addition and subtraction - keep practicing those facts!

We put green dots for our most comfortable topics and orange for topics we're not 100% confident about YET!



Monday, September 14, 2015

End of Week Update, 9/11

Our second week (4 days...) was a blur!  We are off to a busy start of fourth grade already.  Read about our latest work and check out the photos below.  Don't forget to leave a comment by following the directions on the right side of the page - remember, no last names, please!


  • In math, we are busy with place value!  We've learned how to represent numbers in lots of different ways - standard form, expanded form, base-10 blocks, and word form.  We noticed a really cool feature about our base-10 number system!  Each place value increases by x10 as you move to the left.  Cool!  We also learned about how to use <, >, and = to compare BIG numbers.  We started working on rounding numbers to different place values and we'll continue practicing that next week.  Thursday 9/17 will be our first math quiz!  Check out the orange study guide that came home to help in studying!
Building place value sculptures - only 100 blocks allowed!








Matching up numbers!
They look different, but they're really the same number represented different ways!

Math + Movement = Magic!



  •  In reading, we are working on noticing and sharing the different ways we think about books as we're reading.  Reading = thinking!  We are working on choosing "just right" books for our book trays and enjoying lots of picture book read alouds as a class.  We've also been working on studying fairy tales as part of our fairy tale unit leading up to our whole class read aloud of The Sisters Grimm: Fairytale Detectives.  We've been paying close attention to point of view - first person and third person - and noticing how the point of view affects the "bias" of a story because the characters' opinions change how they tell the events.  We got a chance to write our own first person fairy tales - they were funny!  We are working on identifying the story elements, or the main ingredients of a story - characters, setting, and plot.  We worked as "crime scene investigators" and reported on the story elements and crimes committed in the fairy tales we've read so far!











  • In writing, we're filling our newly decorated notebooks with lots of fun, personal stuff all about ourselves!  No matter what we write this year, our inspiration comes from within ourselves, so it's important to get our notebooks filled with stuff about US!  We wrote ABC All About Me (alphabetized lists of our favorite people, places, things, foods, etc.) and 50 things we love!  We did some storytelling using our summer fun photos!





  • We started talking about our new science unit - weather!  More fun with weather coming up next week!  In the meantime, watching a few forecasts on the news is a great way to kick off this unit from home as well.  Here is a catchy video to get you started!  I played this song at home and Mr. Adams can't stop singing it...



Next week is full of important events!  Looking forward to a fun and busy week!
  • Wednesday, 9/16 - Len Cabral, storyteller is coming!  What a way to celebrate our summer reading!
  • Wednesday, 9/16 - Parent Orientation sessions in the afternoon!  3:00 - 3:30, 3:35 - 4:05
  • Thursday, 9/17 - Photo Day
  • Thursday, 9/17 - Topic 3 Quiz
  • Friday, 9/18 - Engineering with Mr. Adams!

Friday, September 4, 2015

Our First Week!

Look at these excited first day smiles!

Our first week in 4th grade was fantastic.  We got to meet new classmates and our teachers!  We thought hard about the hopes and dreams we have for ourselves this year!  We had P.E., music, and art!  We met new friends and reconnected with old ones!  We did lots of mix-it-up activities with Miss Farrell's class!  We learned to persevere and to keep moving forward!  We wrote tweets, built marshmallow houses for the three little pigs, browsed our new classroom library, and so much more!

Check out some photos from our first week below!  Subscribe to our blog to receive updates and follow Mrs. Adams on Twitter for the latest Room 20 learning and fun.  It's going to be an amazing year!  Happy Labor Day!

Card house building on our first day!







 

/We are ready to persevere in math - keep moving forward!



Dance Party Friday in the gym!


One big morning meeting with our friends from Miss Farrell's class!

Pipe cleaner sculptures were a fun team-building activity!
















Sam's tweet reminds us of Albert Einstein's advice about perseverance.





Our hopes and dreams for 2015!

Building marshmallow houses for the three little pigs as part of our fairy tale unit!








Look at these BIG BAD WOLVES!






Testing out our designs!




We had a great week!