Welcome Fourth Grade Friends!

The first month of school has quickly flown by, and we are settling into our routines. During this first month, we've been doing some partner and group activities to get to know each other, and develop strong collaboration skills. 

   Students looked for classmates who had things in common with them in the activity"Find Someone Who..."

                                One of the favorite activities the first week was the Cup Challenge.

Each group started with their cups in the formation on the left, and had to try to make the right formation using only a rubber band attached to string. They could not touch the cups with their hands.

While frustrating at times, no one gave up!

Success feels ever sweeter when you have to work for it!

Once groups were successful, they had to return the cups to the starting formation, again with no hands. Wonderful teamwork all around!

Great partner work has been happening in math as well, as we have explored factors, multiples, and arrays. Partners created array posters for a pair of related factors, proving which numbers were prime and which were composite. 

Student also played partner games such as Factor Pairs and Multiple Turnover, which help them see the connection between factors and multiples, as they build fluency for multiplication facts.

Practicing multiplication cards with a partner helps students see which combinations they know and which they still need to work on. 

    Pattern block construction, geoboards, and tangrams were fun activities as we practiced how to do rotations for math workshop.

We're off to a great start in 4th grade!

Iditarod 2014

Every year we learn about the Iditarod dog sled race that takes place every March in Alaska. We read about the inspiration for the race, which was a diphtheria outbreak in 1925 in the city of Nome. Because of the challenges of travel in those days, they had to use dog sleds and mushers to get the life-saving serum to Nome to save the children. We have been reading this book.

As part of ABL, Mrs. Murray has created an Iditarod activity that doesn't require any dogs...just kids, sleds, rope, PVC pipes, and of course, snow, something that we have had PLENTY of this year!

We had so much fun! Check out our slide show to see!

Personalize your own photo slideshow Thanks Mrs. Murray, Mrs. Frey, Mrs. Bagley, Mrs. Crain, Mr. Juers, and Mr. McLaughlin!

Mythology and Engineering!

There is never a dull moment in room 205, and one of the highlights from the fall has to be our study of Greek Mythology!

We learned what myths are and where they came from. Some students already had a lot of background knowledge about the topic.

 The Common Core expects 4th graders to understand common allusions to Greek mythological characters, such as opening Pandora's Box, or a Herculean task. We analyzed 12 different allusions as we read lots and lots of different Greek myths.

We also used myths to work on summarizing, comparing and contrasting, and analyzing character traits.

Students wrote an "Important Poem" about a mythological character written in the style of Margaret Wise Brown's, The Important Book. They did an awesome job! A smaller group of students worked in their spare time on a reader's theater version of Echo and Narcissus, which they performed for the class. It was fabulous!

 

 Right before vacation we had a very special day. Students had already earned a pajama reading celebration, which was cool in itself, but to top it off, we got to participate in Mrs. Stanbro's engineering challenge in the library, which was inspired by the book Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building, by Christy Hale. There were a variety of building materials for kids to use to build structures.

The slide show below will show you the mythology poems, and highlights from both building activities. Enjoy! 

 



Personalize a free slideshow

We Love Science!

Fourth grade studies water throughout the year. We are lucky enough to have monthly visits from Mr. Duff from Portland Water District, who brings awesome hands-on lessons. Today was our first lesson. We learned 3 key points. The first is that 75% of the world is covered by water.

We played a game where Mr. Duff tossed the ball to each person. We kept track of whatever your right thumb was touching...land or water.

Jaden kept track of the responses. You can see that most people landed on water!

Next, Mr. Duff did a demonstration to show how much of the world's water is drinkable.

Earlier in the day, students had made predictions about this at morning meeting.

We imagined that all the world's water could fit into a one-gallon jug. 50% of that water, or 1/2, would be the Pacific Ocean. Another 25%, or 1/4, would be the Atlantic Ocean. And most of the last 25% is other salt water, such as the various seas around the world. 

Only 3% of the world's water is fresh, and much of that is trapped in glaciers. Less than 1% of all the world's water is available for drinking! This really made us think about how important it is to protect our water sources and not to waste water!

The last activity we did was called "The Incredible Journey". Students got to be water molecules, traveling through the water cycle.

There were nine stations around the room with all the places that water can be found.

At each station, you put a color-coded bead on the pipe cleaner and rolled the dice.

The die would tell you to either move to a new station, or stay where you were, because sometimes water gets trapped places for a long time.

We realized that the water cycle is much more complex than just evaporation, condensation, and precipitation!

By looking at the order of the beads, you could retell your water cycle journey.

Everyone had a different journey!

We recorded our journeys on paper and shared them with a partner. 

Look for more science in the coming weeks. We are learning about states of matter and will be doing some cool experiments.