Aurora's Observations

This week Clara was our student of the week! She brought in her "me bag" on Wednesday. We learned that she was very tiny when she was a baby.
We graphed our multiplication tests on Monday and we did a BIG round of applause for those who earned 30 out of 30!

In reader's workshop we read our independent reading books and shared a reading thought. We've been adding to our vocabulary charts and our class chart is growing quite big! We wrote summary paragraphs in our letters to Mrs. Randall this week.

In writer's workshop we learned more about how to make your response to text better. While we were looking at some of the benchmarks, we noticed these fourth graders gave a lot of evidence to support their focus. In Author's Chair this week some people shared their stories that they are working on. We have conferenced and revised our pieces on Fourth Grade Rats and are almost finished.

We played a math game called "Missing Factors". It was fun and challenging for me. It helps us practice our multiplication facts. This is a game that we can sign out to play at home if we would like to. We took a mid-unit math test on how to solve the equation 18 x 7 and use big/small arrays. We've been working on division story problems and connecting division to multiplication.

In social studies, we created our own riddles on VT geography so we could play a class jeopardy game.

Our class colored paper bags so they were colorful for the VT Cares patients. This was a nice way for us to help others this holiday season. We've also visited many younger classrooms to help them make paper cranes for our peace work. Our goal is to make 1,000 cranes in our school.

Mrs. Randall showed us a new way to respond to a text. It's called making a movie! When you are making a movie, you can make a sequel, change the story in a way you thought it should have went, or recreate your favorite scene. In class we made an alternate ending for Fourth Grade Rats. I thought this was pretty cool to do!

We are looking forward to Skyping our K-Buddies this afternoon and having a celebration with them next Wednesday!

Aurora

The week of Dec. 14

Make a Smilebox greeting

Dec

Monday-Isabel and Eleanor were the first K-Readers this week. They decided to read the book, One Winter's Day.

Tuesday-We sent our letters to the author of our choice today! We look forward to hearing back! We learned two helpful strategies in math today. One was the lattice method and the other was partial products. In Spanish we made peace doves to hang on the Earth that Senora Rena painted in her room.



Wednesday-We had a guest teacher because Mrs. Randall was sick. We played a VT geography and solar system jeopardy.

Thursday-We had another guest teacher. We started a new unit in PE.

Friday-Mrs. Randall is back!! We took our mad minute test and I hope I did well. We'll graph results on Monday. We continued to use the strategy "Work backwards" in our POD. We played big array/small array. We played a game on VT geography (sort of a pretest). In Weekly Reader we read an article titled Empty Bellies about world hunger. In our classroom we raise grains of rice to help others using this site; www.freerice.com. Please help us by trying to answer question-each correct answer give 10 grains of rice. We had a lot of fun Skyping with our K-Buddies! They made feet reindeer that they showed us using the web cam.

Hope you enjoy the snow!
Kathleen and Austin B.

Week of Dec. 1

Hello! My name is Brandon and I was last week's Roving Reporter. I worked with Alexis, our photographer.
Monday in gym we did gymnastics. In snack we moved our desks (we do this every month) to a new arrangement. We are in families of four or five. In reading, we read Fourth Grade Rats and discussed the book and found the main idea. In writing, we continued our letters to an author. In recess we played outside. In ELF we talked about habitat.

This is part of the puppet show on rotting logs.







Tuesday we went to school-wide meeting. We read a book on peace. We are looking forward to making cranes. In writing, we worked on our letters-focusing on revision. We circle two words/phrases where we can explode the moment or slow down time. Then we underline two sentences that are untouchable and that means we are proud of them and we don't want them to change. We finished Fourth Grade Rats. I liked the end of it because Suds learned you don't have to be a "rat" to be a "man".

Wednesday we sang songs in music. We sang Walking in a Winter Wonderland! In math we worked on our line plots for bus pick-up times and then analyzed the data to show what time the bus will most likely arrive. In reading we worked with different question types and how to best answer them. We then challenged each other to answer our questions. It was fun! I learned that people think of the same things differently and it's important to give evidence to support your opinion. In writing, we continued our letters and other writing pieces in our writer's notebook.

Thursday in morning meeting we greeted each other with the koosh-ball greeting. In PE we did gymnastics. In writing we worked on conferencing with our letters. In social studies made flash cards for VT's counties and shiretowns (like Alexis and me), while others worked together on a movie. We are putting together video clips of our solar system presentations.

Friday we made paper cranes in morning meeting. In guidance we read a book and worked on listening with our eyes, ears and mouth. In math we played math games focusing multiplication.

I'm looking forward to PE next week-I am working on my valut! I am getting better on my round-offs! (From Brandon)

Good-Bye-Happy Weekend!
From Alexis and Brandon

Week of Nov. 16

Sorry my blog is late, but we had a fun-filled Thanksgiving week!

This week was a really cool week. We got to do a lot of cool things. We watched the shuttle Atlantis take off from Florida! Their mission was to bring supplies to the Space Station. Throughout the day we watched the astronauts prepare and we were lucky enough to see them take off before bus dismissal. It was amazing! It was the first time I've seen a shuttle take off!

We also got to go into a blow-up planetarium! We got to see some constellations and better find our way through the night sky. I thought it was interesting that I got to see a picture of the sun.

We finished up our geography BIG maps. I was excited to bring it home to study. I found it challenging to find all the locations. Working together helped.

We finished our surveys and got to go around to other classes to collect data. I thought it was interesting that most Kindergartners had two pets while fourth graders had more than two on average.

We visited our K-Buddies classroom! We watched Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving and created a turkey with all we were thankful for. We hope you had a fun Thanksgiving!

See ya!
Isabel

Our Digital Story

We tried and tried to upload this to our blog, but it just didn't work. Here is a link to Our Digital Story!

Week of Nov. 9-13

This week we learned more about using the math strategy, Use or Look for a Pattern. We did some problems where we used this strategy and had to keep track of the running total. The Monsters of Muzz and Celia's Buttons were two of the problems we did. The Randall Comic Book Company was funny because our teacher named it after herself!

We presented our solar system projects so Mrs. Randall could video tape us using the Flip Camera. We will be creating a movie with these video clips!

Our class is proud to announce that we have read and responded to 1oo books!!! Now, we are helping out "Team Eli" to raise another 100 book donation to a needy school. This is a project through our book club-Scholastic. Check out our poster on our class door!

Mrs. Randall read Punctuation Takes A Vacation and we wrote a fun writing piece from a prompt she gave us after. We learned that if writing didn't have punctuation, it wouldn't make sense!!

We chose a new class reading book called Fourth Grade Rats by Jerry Spinelli. So far it's about fourth graders, Joey and Suds. Joey is trying to convince Suds to become a fourth grade bully. We think the book is really good! We have a discussion each day about what we've read with our partners.

To introduce the new book to us, Mrs. Randall created a Wordle and posted it in our Moodle.

For read aloud, we finished a book called The Circuit. Each day we would have the "vocab enricher" pull out Spanish words or phrases to talk to Senora Rena about. This memoir had a lot of good description in the writing. You could visualize the setting because the author used a lot of descriptive words. Lindsay presented a bookmark she created to the class. It has a picture of Francisco Jimenez who wrote about his life as an illegal immigrant from Mexico. We look forward to reading the sequel to this book!

We voted on our next read aloud book. The winner was Rat Trap by Michael Daley. It is a 2009 DCF book.

**Our photostory will be downloaded soon!
Thanks!
Nate and Sam

The week of Nov. 2nd

This week continues to be the "week of absences"! Many kids have been out sick! We can't wait for everyone to be back and we get this illness under control.
We've been doing surveys that have to include numbers. Like how many pets do you have? Or, how many teeth have you lost? We have created representation and have some I noticed statements about the data.
Tuesday Mr. B's class came in to survey us. Just about every kid in that class came in on the same day during our read aloud time. I didn't like that because I wanted to hear what was going to happen in our book, The Circuit. At snack time, pin ball has turned into one popular computer game!

Monday we worked on our model of the sun, moon and Earth to show how/why we have night and day. Next Monday we will present. Mrs. Randall will video tape us using the Flip Camera. We will create a movie and post it next week.

Thursday we met with our K-Buddies! We helped them do a science project on using their five senses (except taste)on the playground. Some of our buddies smelled the air, others smelled metal. My k-buddy heard a jet motor, yelling, he touched a metal pole and smelled parsley in the herb garden.

Today in guidance we lost our memories about how we act. So we had to ask our classmates how we act throughout the day. In the end we guessed who lost their memory. We had fun!

Well, this is it for this week's blog! Be sure to read next week too!
Marco and Bliss

School Through Our Eyes-10/26/09

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Week of Oct. 12

Monday-We saw the beginning of a moon video from NASA. It was really cool! At the beginning, there was dancing of the astronauts and then music started. NASA sent a probe to the moon to see if there ever was water. We thought it was cool to see how much dust flew off the moon when the probe hit. We also talked about how reading books helps your writing. For example, If you were reading a book about fairy tales then you could write a story that could take place in a magical land.
Tuesday-In the morning we had all school morning meeting. Later, after snack, we took the NECAP test. It was day one of math. At the end of the day we had Spanish and learned about plurals.
Wednesday-In the morning we read our Math To Know books to learn more about how to make an organized list. Then we had our second day of NECAP. Brandon brought in gum to share. We noticed that having mint gum lasted longer.
Thursday-In PE we had a push up and trunk lift test. Then, it was our final day of NECAP!
Friday-The days are getting shorter! It is getting closer to winter. Today we collected, weighed and organized all of our items for the Kids Can Help food drive! Together, all of the items weighed 260 pounds! We had guidance and reviewed all of the unthinkables. We continued our memoirs in writer's workshop. We conferenced with each other and completed a checklist for feedback. We can't wait to debate one of the articles in Weekly Reader later this afternoon!

Peace Out!
Lindsay and Brandon

Week of 10/5

All fourth graders in the Cheetah Den, climbed Mount Philo! When we got to the top we did a scavenger hunt for signs of life. We found lots of evidence that animals are getting ready for winter. After, we had free time to explore. Next, we wrote poems on "belonging". These are now located in the hallway above the Cheetah Den sign.



In gym this week we learned about walking safety. You should always look left, right, left before crossing the road. Lean out to see past objects.

We worked on the problem solving strategy, use or make a table.

We finished the read aloud book called, Waiting Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hawn. It is a ghost story that was very descriptive, like similes. We liked this book! Now we are reading The Circuit by Francisco Jimenez. It is a memoir and has a lot of Spanish words in it.

We are writing our memoirs in Writer's Workshop. One of the memoirs we've read is Saturdays and Teacakes. We noticed that the author used cool craft techniques. For example, we liked repeated words and sound effects.

In art class, we are working on drawings to get them published.

In Science, we are reading non-fiction text about the solar system and trying to solve a riddle about the night sky. In our moodle, we got to watch a cool video about the solar system and respond to a question. Also, we explored the NASA web site .

We have been taking the NECAP tests this week and will continue next week. The only part we like about it is the mints and gum we get to have during testing! We thought the reading part was better than the math part.

This week was a great week!
Kyle and Isabel

The Week of Sept. 19

In math we discussed multiples and factors, while using a class resource called Math To Know. This picture shows a student sharing his strategy. We have created individual bar graphs to record our scores on the mad minute multiplication assessment. After each test, we add our score to our bar graph. Hopefully, we'll see some improvement!
One of the projects we just finished in writer's workshop, is writing an informational newspaper about ourselves. They are now hanging up in the hallway outside of our classroom and the computer lab. We are now working on our personal memoirs.

We are working on a morning job AKA Problem of the Day! Each week Mrs. Randall teaches us one of the 9 strategies to use when solving math word problems. So far we have learned act out and use objects as well as how to make a diagram.


Our class has families according to islands of desks. As we got to know each other, each family created a name. This is one of the names-K9Cats. There are three more family names; Bounty Hunters, Four A's and Furious Five.



Peace Out,
Lukas and Wyatt

Week of Sept. 14

We've used the laptops to learn about our class web site. We went to different links and played math games. I thought this was so much fun! Another time we went on our class moodle. I liked this because it's kinda like e-mail for our class. On moodle we wrote about a fun event we did over the summer and then reply to other people's post. We took a cool survey where Mrs. Randall asked us to pick the one activity (multiple choice) that we did most often during the summer. Swimming is what we did the most of and writing/reading was the least!
In writer's workshop we had fun creating our own newspaper! We wrote about a fun event, our hero and our favorite book. I liked learning what other people like and who their hero is.
We also wrote bio-poems and made them into posters that hang from the ceiling. We have learned a lot about each other.








In this picture, we're working with the Math To Know books. This scavenger hunt helped us understand how this resource is organized.
Each morning (except Tuesday) we have a problem of the day. We keep these in our POD notebooks and use a math strategy to solve. This week's strategy is "act out the problem or use objects". One problem had us adding money and another was working with the Judy Clocks.

In reader's workshop, we can use a "telephone". If you are working on your fluency, you can read into it using a whisper voice and it will make your voice louder. We've been working on how to use sticky notes, when to abandon books, understanding how to use the listening center, how to choose just-right books, and how to buzz! In read aloud, we finished Hot and Cold Summer. We are now reading When Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. In current events, some of us have sent letters to Weekly Reader. We are answering the American All-Stars clue.



This week we've worked on multiplication, factors and arrays. We worked with our clock partners to make arrays for our number. Later, we used these posters in our museum walk to notice which numbers were prime, composite or square.




Later in the week, we played factor pairs. In the game we would put our finger on an array card to figure out the area without counting the squares.






In science we are learning about the solar system. Stars, how seasons work and day and night. Did you know the new moon begins on 9/18. We will be observing the night sky for the next 29 days!
Happy Friday!
Eleanor

Summer Fun

Easton and I had lots of fun this summer running together! He ran his first race with me (July 4th- 1 mile fun run in Richmond) and loved it! He also joined me during my Tuesday night races at Catamount. Getting exercise and being outside is what our family enjoys.

Welcome Back to School!

I hope you had a relaxing and enjoyable summer! Our blog will focus on two of our classroom jobs-photographer and roving reporter. Each week, two students will collaborate and post their pictures and thoughts about the week's events! So keep checking back to see what has been added!