Hopes and Dreams

Thanks to all of you who were able to come and join us on Wednesday evening. The desserts were delicious and we hope that you were able to chat and make connections with others on the Mosaic team. We will have our Curriculum Night next Thursday evening beginning at 6:30. This is a time to find out more about our school and team. We will present information around communication and curriculum. The teacher presentation is followed by an information expo where you can find out more about whole school initiatives and current topics in the world of education. If you cannot join us on Thursday I will post our Power Point presentation on next week's blog post.

This week in fourth grade has been all about goal setting. We began to brainstorm our hopes and dreams for the school year. Using The Big Orange Splot as a mentor text, the students are designing houses that symbolize the dreams that they have for themselves. They have written about how they can work to achieve those dreams and how teachers can help them. We talked about growth mindset using this video as a fun connection. Then the students set goals for themselves as mathematicians. We will use our pre/post assessments and weekly exit tasks to reflect on these goals and self-assess our progress.

We launched our first interdisciplinary literacy/theme unit on a favorite topic of fourth graders....Gum. Through this unit students will learn comprehension strategies like close reading and comparing and contrasting, they will also write strong opinion (R.A.C.E.) responses, and design and carry out an inquiry task around the "best" type of gum. This week they read about the history of gum and made "Tracks in the Snow." This close reading strategy allows students to look deeply at a piece of complex text and analyze the message. We also discussed and practiced several strategies that strong readers use to attack unknown vocabulary words. Some of the new words that we came across in our passage around gum were resin, chicle, urge, and ever-evolving. Lastly, we read two different poems about gum and used evidence from the text to compare and contrast both pieces.

Our Tracks in The Snow Codes

A guest read aloud by Miss Nadine

Next week we will set up our inquiry task to test which type of gum is the "best". We will develop criteria, establish a control and variables, and carry out fair tests to answer our question. Stay tuned for our discoveries and to read students' conclusions.