A Big Bite

What a week!  We have been working on so much and learning a great deal.  We are working on addition and subtraction in math and have continued our STEM project, Puffmobiles!  Understanding roles in cooperative groups continues to be a focus not just on the Puffmobile project, but across all areas.  It is great to see everyone working hard and contributing equally.  We have continued our study of the water cycle in Science and are looking forward to creating terrariums next week as part of non fiction writing (how to write a science lab) and by studying the life cycle more closely by creating a mini ecosystem in a jar.  In social studies we are continuing to work on map and globe skills and will be focusing on latitude, longitude and how to find exact locations on a map by using coordinate grid points AND degree coordinates.  We will become our own GPS systems! :)

We are still working on launching Reader's workshop and focusing on the skills that make us feel strong as readers.  We are examining questions readers have in order to improve comprehension and to begin talk worthy discussions about books.  Choosing just right books is still a focus for many of us, and reading for meaning as opposed to reading for speed is a goal too. As part of word study, we are learning about prefixes, suffixes and using context clues to understand the meaning of unknown words.  This is a great reading strategy and one that we will start to use across the curriculum.  In writer's workshop, we have been focusing on writing complete sentences with varying sentence structure to convey hopes, dreams and goals for fourth grade.  We even used the Chrome books to take "Selfies," and then insert them into our document.  A shout out to Peter for helping us with this skill.  We can't wait to show them to you at Open House on Thursday!  In poetry workshop, we finished writing bio poems which are now hanging in the Poet's Corner and will be the first poem in our poetry journals.  We will learn about Walt Whitman next week and begin writing list poems.  We are very busy in 4th grade! We are looking forward to seeing everyone at Open House on Thursday night at 6:30!