News and Notes 5/8

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Falling Apart

The fourth grade mathematicians are learning how to make things fall apart... Well, not exactly fall apart.  Rather, they are exploring the concepts of breaking a whole into even parts.  The study of fractions can seem very abstract at first, but the more we dig into the concept, the more we discover that it is a very relevant and tangible part of mathematics.  The fourth grade mathematicians have a great amount of content and skills relating to fractions that they are meant to master this year.  As fourth graders, we are asking that they know how to identify the parts of a fraction and what they mean.  Then students are meant to be able to order a given set of fractions from least to greatest, even for fractions that have different denominators.  This means we have been relying heavily on our skills of factors and multiples to find the "lowest common denominator" (LCD) for a given pair of fractions so that we can accurately compare them.  We have also done some work with adding and subtracting fractions.  Thankfully, even though math can sometimes feel really challenging in fourth grade, the only thing that is breaking into parts are the fractions!

Greatness

To be honest, there are many children's books that are very poor examples of literature.  They lack depth of character or have extremely predictable plots.  Sometimes it can be hard to teach students how to be good readers when they don't have access to quality literature.  We have worked hard to build a school and classroom library that provides our students with texts that are highly engaging as well as high quality.  This week the fourth graders began reading through a supplemental reading series called Junior Great Books.  These books are collections of classic pieces of literature complied into a series designed specifically for children.  In the fourth grade series our readers are introduced the Lewis Carroll's Alice, learn more about Langston Hugh's world of Thank You M'am, and discover with Rudyard Kipling How the Elephant Got Its Trunk.  Over the next few weeks the fourth grade readers will explore these and other great examples of English literature.  As we read, we will also take time to participate in discussions following the Junior Great Books model.  This is basically the Socratic method of discussing where the teacher is the questioner and facilitator.  The students are called on to answer the questions and must rely heavily on evidence from the text.  This type of discussion is very important for developing our skills in reasoning and debating.  This first week of Junior Great Books was very successful, so it seems very likely that the fourth grade readers will continue to shine as they read through other "great" texts.

Hamburgers

In writing this week the fourth graders built hamburgers.  Actually we explored the comparison of a research paper and a hamburger.  We discovered as we began writing the rough drafts of our research papers that we were essentially building a hamburger-like structure.  We explored how the top bun was like an introduction.  The introduction has a hook with grabs the reader's attention.  It includes their main idea and has a preview of the supporting details to come.  Then the "meat" of the research paper are the body paragraphs.  These paragraphs are sandwiched in the middle of the paper and include all of the specific details and facts that support our main idea (thesis.)  Finally, reminiscent of the introduction, we talked about how our conclusion paragraph will review, restate, and close out our paper.  The writers have been hard at work this week building some remarkable research papers that are almost as appealing as a juicy hamburger!