News and Notes 9/27

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Designing with Nature

There is a special project going on at Simonds School this year.  We welcomed Artist in Residence, Ron King, to our school for a special project.  We are going to design and build an outdoor space to serve as a kind of classroom or meeting space for our school.  This “amphitheatre” will not be constructed out of just any materials, but will be a natural construction.  This week the fourth graders, along with the rest of the school, took turns meeting with Mr. King and designing their own models of the outdoor space.  Using pinecones, rocks, moss, and other natural materials, the students built models of what they want the space to look like.  The fourth graders had lots of fun designing with nature and are looking forward to using the space behind our school in a new way!  We discovered this week that designing is fun, especially when you can design with nature!

Science In Review

As we close the book on the first part of our rocks and minerals studies, the fourth graders had a few chances to demonstrate their knowledge of the world of geology.  First, we started the week off with a little review game.  The fourth graders answered questions about types of rocks, the rock cycle, and all kinds of geology vocabulary.  They did an amazing job working together to answer the questions.  Usually when we play trivia games the goal is to beat the teacher, who gets points whenever the class misses a question.  Needless to say, with this class of rock experts, the teacher lost this round of review big time!  Being able to play games and practice working cooperatively is an added bonus to the main objective of reviewing the science curriculum.  By the end of the week the fourth graders were ready to show off their rocks and minerals knowledge on our final test.  They did a great job of using words and pictures to demonstrate their understanding of the rock cycle and the ways that rocks are formed and change.  As we move into a deeper study of the earth’s changing surface next week, it seems likely that these amazing scientists will continue to dig deeply into their learning!

It’s a Predicament!

This week in math we discussed the term “problem solving.”  The fourth graders shared what they thought the word “problem” meant: a predicament, something tricky, bad, unusual, negative, an issue, equation, or something that just went wrong.  From here we talked about our role as problem solvers.  The goal is to know how to face “problems” of any kind, from tricky questions in math to conflict on the playground.  We want to develop these essential skills so we can be super-duper problem solvers!