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!