End of Week Update, 10/2

Fall time at Kennedy School is here!

Our first full week of school and the beginning of October was full of lots of new opportunities for fun and learning.  We also had Open House, which gave us a chance to showcase our classroom for our families!

In math, we're working hard on practicing our addition and subtraction skills, including showing and explaining our mathematical thinking!  We worked in teams to show our best thinking with some challenging addition and subtraction problems.  Some of them even included algebra!  Algebra is when we figure out a mystery value in an equation.  We haven't quite gotten the hang of algebra YET, but we'll keep revisiting it this year!  Our Topic 4 quiz is Tuesday and then we'll be heading onto multiplication, so be sure to keep practicing those facts at home!!

In writing, we planned our first personal narratives!  They are true stories about ourselves that have heart.  We'll be drafting this week and working hard to make them amazing!  We also wrote "I Am..." biographical poems about ourselves to share at Open House.  They are funny, honest, and as unique as we are!  They are also our first Google Doc in 4th grade.  More writing coming soon - stay tuned!

In reading, we are working hard being active readers who notice, wonder, ask questions, and make predictions!  We noticed a lot about characters this week, both in The Sisters Grimm and in our own independent reading books.  We worked on choosing important details to create a summary of Ch. 3 and can't wait to read more next week after the cliffhanger we read on Friday!

In science, we are watching Hurricane Joaquin!  We are observing our terrariums and noticing the water cycle happening in our very own jars.  We'll be continuing to learn about weather and the water cycle in the coming weeks!  We're also working hard on our first engineering project - our puff mobiles!  Our job is to BUILD, TEST, and REDESIGN!  We are getting excited for the puff mobile race on Friday!

Can't wait to update you after our next awesome week of fourth grade fun!

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!

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!