News and Notes 3/27

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Practice Makes Perfect...er

Learning is a process.  This truth is both comforting and frustrating.  This week the fourth grade mathematicians continued working on long division.  When we face a challenge this complicated, it is easy for us to want to give up.  There are too many steps!  It's too difficult!  I keep messing up!  These refrains could easily dominate the climate of our classroom.  Instead, we've spent a lot of time this week talking about how our practice with long division is helping us to refine and "perfect" our computation skills.  Of course, we all make mistakes, but the more we practice this important math skill, the more capable we are becoming!  What an exciting moment when a fourth grader solves their first long division problem on their own!  More and more this week we were seeing moments like this!  And so forward we march, digging deeply and showing grit and making sure that we practice, practice, practice!

Jobs

The fourth grade colonists have arrived in the "New World."  As they begin working on establishing their colonies, one of the essential things they need to do is determine what jobs will need to be fulfilled to make sure that their colony survive.  We know that in order for the colony to grow and thrive, we must all do our parts.  Some of us are governors who facilitate the group discussions, some are auditors who make sure that everyone has the right information, while others are mappers and negotiators.  In the end, this colonial simulation is giving the fourth graders a great experience of history as well as exposure to what it means to be a productive member of a society that depends on each other! 

Energy

If you've not spent much time in the fourth grade classroom, you may not realize just how much we could use the word "energy" to describe our room.  The students are amazing learners who come in each morning overflowing with energy.  In some ways this can be a challenge to tackle in the school setting, but in other ways it makes the learning process exciting and engaging.  This week in science we took this term energy and tried to look at it from many different angles.  We spent one afternoon in science just sharing connections we can make to this word.  From sunlight to batteries to recess, we realized just how many different ways we use the term "energy."  In the coming weeks we will be exploring a few different types of energy and will learn how this energy is used, how it changes, and how we can conserve it.  Needless to say, this energetic class of fourth graders is very excited to study more about energy!

In Combination

In reading workshop lately we have been making inferences.  The fourth grade readers are doing a really great job of collecting clues from narratives and then "reading between the lines" to form conclusions that aren't explicitly stated.  This week we took our skills of making inferences and combined them with our story structure analysis strategy.  Reading comprehension strategies are there to help us understand a text, but when we put them together in combination, we find our understanding increases greatly.   Using simple read aloud narratives, we practiced monitoring our understanding of characters and plot and then made inferences about these elements based on clues from the text.  How exciting to see the depth of understanding when we practice our reading comprehension strategies together in combination!