News and Notes 4/24

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade 

Oh the Thinks You Can Think!

Every spring the students of Simonds Elementary School participate in "Culture Day."  This is one day out of our school year that is set aside for students to explore and appreciate the arts and find how these integrate into their other academic pursuits and their lives outside of school.  This year the students of Simonds School got to be in attendance at the Rochester Opera House's production of Seussical the Musical.  Just as you would expect from something associated with the beloved Dr. Seuss, the show was full of colorful scenery, larger-than-life characters, and powerful messages about belonging and social responsibility.  The silly songs and the bright costumes added to the highly engaging performances.  The fourth graders, along with the rest of their schoolmates, thoroughly enjoyed the show.  In the midst of a season of busy learning and testing, it is great to take time to see how learning can lead us to such creative accomplishments!  The theme of thinking and pursuing knowledge was emphasized over and over again in fun and exciting ways.  We all left the performance with the theme song running through our minds.  It is exciting to see what "thinks" our fourth graders can think each new day!

Version of the Story

Some of the most complicated skills that fourth grade readers are asked to develop are the skills of synthesizing and summarizing.  One way that we can encourage these critical skills in the fourth grade thinkers is by presenting different versions of the same story.  This week we were given a unique opportunity to practice our summarizing and synthesizing skills.  We had the play Seussical the Musical fresh in our minds when we read through the familiar picture book Horton Hears a Who and watched the short animated film based on the book.  We made a Venn diagram to compare these three versions of a similar story.  We found that there were similarities in the plot, characters, and settings.  We discussed similarities in the theme that flowed through these different versions of the story.  We also talked about how presenting a story in different forms will inevitably change some of the ways that the audience interprets and responds to it.  As we step into the world of summarizing and synthesizing, the fourth grader readers are doing a great job of bringing these critical thinking skills to their work!

A Part of the Whole

In math this week we dug more deeply into the concept of fractions.  Building on our strong understanding of multiplication, we used the ideas of multiples and factors to help us determine what fractions were equivalent (equal.)  The fourth grade mathematicians were given the option to use geometric representations of fractions or computational number sentences to determine if a set of given fractions were equivalent or not.  It is exciting to see how some of our minds are more comfortable with shapes and visuals while others prefer to talk in terms of numbers and computation.  Either strategies we used, we came to the same conclusion.  It was a good chance to recognize that often there is more than one way to get to an answer.  In the end we were all able to analyze and determine the value of a given fraction, a part of the whole.