News and Notes 12/13

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Perfection and Practice

Although it certainly isn't always true, the old saying “Practice makes perfect” is a good way of looking at many important foundational skills. In math this week the fourth graders reviewed and practiced their addition and subtraction computation skills. Starting out these lessons, it was evident that the fourth grade mathematicians had already invested much time and energy over the past few years to the subject of addition and subtraction. We quickly reviewed the meaning of regrouping and connected our recent study of place value to our work on addition and subtraction. The fourth graders were then asked to dig more deeply into their understanding, not only applying their computation skills to finding sums and differences of number problems, but also making connections to other recent math subjects including: applying a variety of problem-solving strategies, rounding and estimating, and solving multi-step problems. Although we are still learning and sometimes making mistakes, the fourth grade mathematicians are certainly demonstrating how practice makes our work more perfect!

Characters in Conflict

In reading workshop this week the fourth graders worked on applying multiple comprehension strategies to a single text. We began by asking questions and wondering about the text. As we read, we focused on asking questions related to the structure of the story. Once we started to hear our questions answered, we identified which questions were answered directly and then which questions we had to make inferences to answer, those questions which were answered more indirectly in the text. The fourth graders did a great job of balancing these different reading skills. In the end we had many days of great dialogue about the text. The next step is for us to be working even more diligently on applying these strategies to our independent reading!

Hour of Code

In honor of Computer Science Education Week, our fourth graders took some time to learn about computer programming this week. Using a very exciting and user-friendly online resource called “Hour of Code” (www.code.org), the fourth graders discovered the basics of computer programming. As our education continues to become more and more intermingled with our technology, it is essential that our students be familiar and skilled with technology. This Hour of Code challenge was one small and fun way to help our students see how computers work and how they can become computer programmers, even in fourth grade!