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!