Winter Carnival

We ended spirit week with Winter Carnival.  This year the wind and temperature forced us to modify some of our outdoor adventure plans.  The fourth graders really enjoyed participating in an impromptu whole-school Zumba session in place of the hike up the hill!

News and Notes 2/20

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Spirited

This week was Simonds School Spirit Week.  The fourth graders participated in the festivities by dressing up.  On Monday they wore fancy clothes, on Tuesday they sported their sporting gear, on Wednesday they were all mixed up, and on Thursday they donned blue and gold (the Kearsarge School colors).  On Friday the whole school enjoyed "Winter Carnival."  We moved from station to station enjoying activities related to winter.  What a great chance to practice some of our skills of respect and cooperation!  It was also a special time to enjoy some good fun together as a whole school.  After this spirited week though, it'll be nice for the fourth graders to have some time off to recover from all this fun!

Application

We have been working for weeks on long multiplication.  We've talked about different concepts relating to multiplication and learned many different ways to get to a final product.  The fourth graders know all about place value concepts relating to multiplication.  They have been growing in their multiplication "snap-fact" fluency in order to solve the long multiplication problems more swiftly and accurately.  This week as we transition away from how to solve long multiplication problems, we took some time to examine why we would solve problems using long multiplication.  The fourth graders worked on creating their own long multiplication stories.  From these stories, they determined real-life situations when you would use long multiplication to solve a problem.   Then the fourth graders used their growing long multiplication computation skills to actually solve their problems and find a final product.  It was a good way to build off of our computation skills and see them applied to different situations. 

How To...

In writing this week, the fourth graders demonstrated their "know how" by writing instructional paragraphs.  We took the topic of winter activities and each selected one example that we knew well.  From this we created a list of necessary supplies and then formulated the steps involved in accomplishing our given activity.  In the end we created some fabulous instructional paragraphs about wintry activities.  The fourth grade writers are using their non-fiction writing skills to create some informative and helpful documents.  It is also exciting to see a growing awareness of the value of the process of writing.  As we work our way from brainstorming to prewriting to drafting to editing and revising and finally to publishing, the fourth graders are learning how to appreciate the process as well as the final product.  As we pull our published "how to" paragraphs together, we are recognizing that it is quite a useful document!  So, if you ever have any questions about winter activities, feel free to come check out our instructional writing pieces!

Vacation

Wishing all of the fourth graders and their families a fun and safe February vacation!  We are looking forward to a time of rest and also a change in schedule, but we're also looking forward to returning in March with a renewed excitement for learning!  I know I can't wait to hear all about the adventures the fourth graders have over this next week! 

School Spirit Week

On this week of school spirit, the fourth graders have done a great job showing off their creativity and enthusiasm for Simonds School!

Dress Up Fancy Day

Well-Rounded

We want our fourth graders to be "well-rounded" individuals.  We want to encourage them to explore a diversity of interests and come to in- and out-of-school challenges with perseverance and enthusiasm.  From sports like the WYSA ski program to clubs like Boy Scouts, we are happy to celebrate their accomplishments beyond the classroom!

News and Notes 2/13

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Kindness

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day.  A time when our culture celebrates love and belonging and relationship.  Well, in fourth grade we have been celebrating this all year!  The fourth graders continue to work hard each day to demonstrate kindness and respect to their peers.  In small and simple ways, like picking up trash in the classroom or saying "Excuse me." to each other, they are celebrating the spirit of community.  This week we honored Valentine's Day with the exchange of fun and colorful cards, but really we are working and growing each day in our celebration of a learning community that is defined by kindness and cooperation.

Problem Solvers

There is so much talk in education about problem solving.  The idea of having our learning be "inquiry-based" is quite trendy!  This is very good news for a classroom full of inquisitive and enthusiastic fourth grade learners.  This week we were able to participate in one of the many ways that Simonds School encourages students to question and puzzle and discover: the Kearsarge Math League.  This quarterly "competition" gives each fourth grader the opportunity to take their math concepts and their problem-solving skills and apply them to a 30-minute math "meet."  Going into the Math League, we never know what kinds of questions we'll be asked to solve, but we can always be certain that it is going to take a great deal of creativity, problem-solving skills, and grit to get the work done!  The half-hour goes by too quickly and in the end we can all feel the great sense of accomplishment that comes when we tackle a difficult task.  Many thanks to our district enrichment coordinator, Erica Herr, for her work in facilitating the Kearsarge Math League! 

  

Test Success

As we look ahead to the quickly approaching standardized testing for fourth grade, we are trying to help the students gear up for the test.  This week we worked on developing our awareness of test language.  As we've been talking about making inferences in reading and looking for clues, we were easily able to apply these skills to a different situation.  We looked at a variety of sample math problems and had to determine which operation (addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division) would get us to the right answer.  With the help of our Math Cart Master, Mrs. Abbott, we were able to not only figure out how to solve the problems, but also had to defend our reasoning.  In these small activities we are developing the fourth graders as thinkers and also providing them with skills and vocabulary that will help them be more successful test-takers.  Hopefully the preparations we make for testing will allow these amazing fourth grade thinkers to clearly and accurately convey all of their extraordinary ideas and abilities!  They have accomplished so many great things this year and we want to give them every opportunity to show off what they know and can do on these tests!  Forget about test anxiety!  For these fourth graders we're hoping that they'll be able to look at the standardized assessments as another exciting opportunity to shine!

The Great and Mighty Math Mobile

Each Wednesday we are visited by Mrs. Abbott and her "math mobile." We play fun games and do different activities to practice math skills and concepts.  Here is a glimpse into today's computation vocabulary activity...

Blizzard Bag Day 3

Today marks the third long-distance learning day for fourth graders. Working from home and integrating technology is a giant step into the future of education.  It seems like the trend of taking learning outside of the confines of the classroom is catching.  So, how has your Blizzard Bag Day 3 gone?  It'll be great to hear all about the fourth grade learning adventures when we meet back together in class tomorrow!  Until then, happy learning!

News and Notes 2/6

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Fourth Grade's Got Talent

Karate, singing, dancing, acting... you name it and these amazing fourth graders can do it!  This week the fourth graders, along with the other students of Simonds Elementary School, got to participate in the annual Talent Show.  It was a great time of celebrating the gifts and interests that our students often can only pursue outside of the classroom.  It is the goal of education to help students grow and become well-rounded, active, happy, and engaged members of society.  The talent show was one way to show students that they should be pursuing interests beyond the classroom and developing their abilities in these different areas.  What an exciting time to celebrate the amazing students at Simonds School!  It was a moment of great excitement to see just how talented and special each of these kiddos are!

"Short Cut"

Why would you travel the long way when you can take the short cut?  So often this is the mentality of our fast-moving culture.  We want everything to be done faster, to be able to accomplish goals more efficiently, and to move on to the next thing more quickly.  Unfortunately in the midst of this world of speed and productivity, we can often miss the journey because our eyes are so focused on the final destination.  This truth often presents a challenge for us as learners in a classroom setting.  We can all become so keen on getting things done that we miss the richness of the experience of the learning process.  This week, after a very long time of building up to it, we finally learned the standard or "short cut" algorithm for long multiplication.  Since we have spent such a long time carefully building concepts and fluency skills, the introduction to the most efficient means of solving long multiplication problems was really not very exciting.  In fact, many of the students who are now very proficient in their understanding of place value and multiplication, argued that they would prefer to use one of the other methods we have learned to solve long multiplication problems.  They wanted to use the strategy that "makes sense" to them.  What a difference between this mentality that says find the answer the fastest way possible, regardless of how well you understand what it is that you are doing.  Needless to say, we will continue to practice the "short cut" algorithm of long multiplication because it is a very handy tool, but we hopefully won't lose the value of the process that has brought us to this place in our mathematical pursuits!

Prompted

The fourth grade writers took time this week to complete a district writing prompt.  Periodically throughout the year we use more standard forms of assessment in writing to measure student progress.  This writing prompt just so happened to be a persuasive prompt, which is the genre of writing that we have been focused on this past month.  It was very exciting to see the high level of engagement and even enthusiasm for the writing process during this assessment.  The fourth graders have started to take our writing workshop skills and methods and are generalizing them into their own writing, even on assessments.  What an exciting development in our lives as writers!

Simple Machines Projects

The fourth graders worked outside of school to create their own simple machines.  Check out these amazing beyond-the-classroom projects!