A Big Bite

We have had another incredible week in room 23. On Friday, in addition to team spirit day,Mr. Adams, an electrical engineer from Raytheon came to talk to all of the fourth graders about the engineering process in order for us to begin working on our first engineering project, Puffmobiles! He came around to each classroom and worked with the individual teams on their designs. These videos above show Mr. Adams working in our classroom. We are very excited to get started building our Puffmoblies next week. A goal of the project is to learn how to work in cooperative groups, in addition to the engineering goals. Ask your child about this fun fourth grade tradition. We have finished chapter one in math and have taken the first math test. In Reader's workshop, we have continued to work on reading stamina during independent reading time, and we are making good progress. As a class, we have read 92 books so far this year and are on track to read over 1,000 books by the end of the school year! Many of us are making good decisions when choosing just right books, and putting books on hold that are a bit of a challenge. In Writer's Workshop we have continued writing goals for the school year and have taken this piece of writing to publication. Also, we have begun writing rough drafts of list poems, which is a style of free verse poetry. Mrs. Williams read several list poems from Georgia Heard's book, Falling Down the Page. In science we have learned more about the scientific method and will do some experiments next week. Our goal is to build terrariums on Thursday, and we will be needing a jar and plant clippings for this experiment. The study of maps and globes in Social Studies continued with a focus on latitude and longitude. We will be learning how to find exact locations on a map or globe given specific degree coordinates. An Open Circle goal for us is to follow the guidelines that we set up as a class during the first week of school, particularly the goal that includes being a good listener and not talking when others are talking. This is proving to be challenging for us, but with more focus, I am sure that we can be successful with this goal. Thanks to Mrs. Macchi for helping me meet my goal of 20 followers, and to Mrs. Toye for putting me over the top! Until next week,

Mrs. Williams