News and Notes 1/23

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

The Hidden Meaning

The fourth grade readers have done a wonderful job this week of collecting clues and finding the hidden meaning while reading.  They have been working together through poems with all kinds of hidden meanings.  The reading comprehension strategy of making inferences is a great practice of seeing how much of the text we are understanding.  Poetry is a perfect genre for making inferences.  The meanings come in layers and there is always more to discover as we read and dig deeply into a poem.  Over the next few weeks we will continue making inferences and developing our reading comprehension skills.  The key now is remembering to practice these skills during independent reading.  Asking ourselves what the "hidden meaning" of a text might be is a best practice for all readers!

Geometry and Computation

Generally speaking, fourth graders tend to enjoy geometry over computation types of math problems.  Given a choice between a pile of math fact flash cards and a bin of pattern blocks, students will inevitably gravitate toward the colors, shapes, and patterns of geometry.  This week we began work with long multiplication.  We started this work not with the steps of the standard algorithm, but with geometry.  We reviewed the connection between area of rectangles and multiplication.  Then we started to solve double-digit by double-digit problems using arrays.  This requires that we know place value concepts and our basic multiplication facts.  Sometimes students will question why we don't just start by learning the "short cut" (standard algorithm) for long multiplication.  The answer is a difficult one.  The simplest defense I give for why we start with arrays is that we want the fourth grade mathematicians to not only know the steps to finding the right answer, but we want them to be able to understand the process that leads us to the  right answer.  This week we saw the geometry-computation connection causing light bulbs of comprehension to shine brilliantly around the classroom.  This foundation of understanding will help as we apply these concepts to the more efficient algorithms for solving long multiplication problems.

Where in the World?

Where are we?  The fourth graders were asked this question this week.  Where in the world do you live?  We started very small, with our homes and classrooms.  From here we built out to larger communities of neighborhoods and schools.  Then we moved to towns, counties, states, regions, countries, and continents.  To begin our study of geography, it is important that the students see all of this terminology that we use to describe places.  As we move forward to discover different map skills and look at the different ways people move about on the earth, we will discover that the question "Where in the world?" informs so much of our lives.  This mini-unit on geography will also help set the stage for our study of history as we look next at the colonial period of American history.