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!