News and Notes 5/16

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Scientists Representing

The spring brings with it warmer weather, sunshine, and for the fourth graders of New Hampshire, science testing.  This week our class demonstrated our great science knowledge and skills with the Science NECAP test.  Three mornings of testing were tiring, but thankfully the students were all able to persevere.  In these potentially stressful times of testing it is a huge comfort to have the support and encouragement of our families and community.  Many thanks to everyone who helped the fourth graders succeed on the test by making sure they were well rested, had extra time to play and relax, and made sure they had healthy foods to eat.  A special thanks to our room volunteer, Diane Brunetti, who provided the students with amazingly yummy snacks each morning!  Our test results will be a while in the coming, but we can say for now that we worked hard and represented the great scientific minds of Simonds School!

Just So Stories

The Junior Great Books series is a collection of classic literature for children.  This week we began reading the fourth grade Junior Great Books.  Our first story was taken from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.  The Elephant's Child is a classic story about childhood curiosity.  Instead of simply reading and discussing the story, we decided to explore a variety of different versions of the story, including an audio book, a digital text, and a short film.  Our discussion of the story is enriched when we are able to pull together different versions and interpretations of the same great tale. 

Word Detectives

This week the fourth graders had multiple opportunities to become word detectives.  As we studied different subjects we found new and unfamiliar words that required our detective skills to figure out.  While reading The Elephant's Child we kept running into the term "insatiable curiosity."  We discussed what "satiate" meant and then tried to put together the idea of what it would mean to have a wondering nature that could never get enough answers.  While reading the story we met a character called the "bicolored python rock snake."  We used our word smarts to determine that this meant a two-colored snake, just like a bicycle which has two wheels.  Then in ecology we ran into the term "life cycle."  We made connections to other uses of the term "cycle" including bicycle and recycle.  We enjoyed being word detectives and putting together meaning based on our prior word knowledge. 

Introducing...

As we move ahead with our research papers, this week the fourth grade writers created the introductory paragraphs of their five-paragraph essays.  We already had all the important parts, so it was just a matter of putting it all together.  We started with a "hook" to grab our readers' interests.  Whether it was a question, an interesting fact, or a surprise, we used specific techniques to make our opening lines attention-grabbers.  From here we put in our big idea sentence, which we are calling our "thesis statement."  Following our thesis comes a preview of our three main supporting ideas, which will be the three body paragraphs of our essays.  It is so rewarding to see our essays taking shape after weeks of researching and prewriting!