News and Notes 6/12

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Ready, Set, Read!

We have passed 10,000 minutes of out-of-class reading time!  In honor of this accomplishment, this Monday we celebrated our second "Ready, Set, Read!" day.  This day was reserved for the purpose of celebrating reading.  We dressed up as book characters, did crafts related to books, read books with partners, read aloud to each other, listened to dramatized audio books, and even watched an animated version of our latest Junior Great Book, The Elephant's Child by Rudyard Kipling.   It was a really fun day for these fourth grade readers.  It's pretty awesome that when they reached this goal of reading 10,000 minutes, the reward they requested most was to have more time to read!

Story Town

As a fun and creative way of pulling together our reading adventures for the year, this week the fourth grade readers created story structures.  Using the essential elements of all narratives: character, setting, plot, and author's message, the fourth graders create little paper houses that were decorated with summaries of their most recent reads.  The fourth grade readers had fun sharing their books with their classmates and demonstrated a strong understanding of the different parts of their stories.  After we finished creating our "story structures,"  we used our creativity to make some roads, trees, and other parts to create a whole little story town.  If this town existed in real-life, it seems likely that this group of enthusiastic readers would be happy to live there!

I Do Declare!

This week the fourth historians learned about the Declaration of Independence.  We discovered that the 4th of July is more than just hot dogs and fireworks.  We found that this is also the day that we celebrate our independence.  What a great time of learning when we get to see how the stories from past generations impact our lives today.  We read excerpts from some of the big "ideas" of the American Revolution, including Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Patrick Henry's famous "Give me liberty or give me death." speech.  It was exciting to see how the American Revolution was very much a war of ideas.  As we focus so much of our energies into learning and exploring ideas, it is good for the fourth grade learners to see how ideas have the power to change (and improve) the world around us.  So, as we learn more about our country's past, we are also learning more about how we can be thankful for our independence and use these freedoms to make the world a better place!

Summer Reading

The fourth graders worked this week to create a wishlist of books for their summer reading.  Although they will go home with district-assigned summer reading work, it is important that they also formulate a plan for continuing their own "reading for fun" for the summer months.  Look out this summer for some special mail headed to your in-coming fifth graders encouraging them to jump into a good book during their time away from classroom learning.  It was fun to see just how excited the students were getting about reading this summer!  This enthusiasm for reading and learning will most certainly help us as we enter the fifth grade reading adventure!