Winding Down

This has been a busy and warm week in 4th grade. In literacy we have continued to look at mood, speaker and theme of poems including a fun matching game on Friday where students had to use reasoning skills to figure out which theme made sense with each poem. Students also shared their weathering and erosion learning as well as practiced their presentation skills by creating a collaborative Google slide presentation and presenting their individual slide to the class. These scientists shared knowledge on hoodoos and mushroom rocks, wind erosion and ice erosion, where to live to protect yourself from weathering and tons of other information in between.

Imaginative mathematicians began to design our dream playground this week. We brainstormed ideas, learned about simple machines and how they impact our playgrounds, measured our actual playground and some items within it and used data and graphing to determine which items were most important to us all. Students are very excited about this project and were beginning early on to draft ideas of how to best arrange their dream playgrounds.

We had a few “zig zags” in our schedule this week. For one, we were welcomed to a puppet show presentation put on by Swift House students called “Banish Bullying.” These middle school students have been working on a special curriculum which culminated in sharing this show with us. The puppets were entertaining and the content were meaningful. Our students were able to think critically about what to do in situations of bullying and to consider how best they can be an ally to others.

Another change was the Kaleidoscope House play on a variety of science topics Thursday morning. Our students enjoyed this show that combined music, theatre and singing to showcase the Kaleidoscope’s learning this year. On Thursday afternoon we visited with Swift House students again for their annual “Swiftville.” Each year Swift students design their own currency and economy with each student or group of students developing a plan for an item or experience to “sell” and working hard to get other students that visit the house to buy or invest in their product. Our students loved this afternoon and most brought home some treats as proof of their purchases! :)

We’ve also loved to get outside this week for snack on the tennis courts. Getting some sun and fresh air mid morning has been quite a treat!

Next week we are looking forward to completing our playground designs and building models, writing poems inspired by Love that Dog and listening to our dedicated 4th grade musicians in their first beginning band concert!

Busy Bees!

There has been an abundance of energy in 4th grade lately and we aren’t surprised with so many zig zags in our schedule and warmer weather. This past week, students spent two days taking NECAP Science testing. This is a New England assessment program designed to evaluate our science curriculum. We focused on many different science and engineering topics this year and overall our students felt confident to show off all of their science smarts. On Wednesday we completed the inquiry task where our students were able to devise and carry out a task to solve a real science problem which is a comfortable and successful process for all of us at this point.

4th grade mathematicians also reflected on their progress with geometry concepts in Unit 5.This coming week, we look forward to using all of our math skills to research for and design a dream playground at WCS as we begin our final math exploration.

Besides science testing, student scientists have also been putting together all of their learning on weathering and erosion in LucidChart mind maps, and have begun to work on a collaborative whole class presentation of their learning. This week they will share their learning and showcase their Google slide with their class.

We also were able to spend a wonderful length of time outside reading independently on Thursday. Research shows us more and more about how valuable this independent reading time is and how it is the most helpful activity to help us become stronger readers. We have seen growth in reading levels and in reading interest over the last two years in part due to this expectation and emphasis on independent reading.

We’ve started a final read aloud book called The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall. The novel is a “summer tale of four sisters, two rabbits and one very interesting boy” and it seems that it is completely winning over most of us, teachers included! It’s a fun and engaging story of summer adventure that we haven’t wanted to put down since we started on Thursday.

On Friday we had our final Four Winds session on Bees and their structure and adaptations which help them to live. These small animals are crucial to our planet. Mrs. Eaton was dressed as a bee herself and at the end we were able to enjoy a honey treat. We all want to extend a huge thank you to our parent volunteers who have worked hard to provide these opportunities for our students.

We are preparing activities for our last week of school including a Spring Staycation day and a Moving Up ceremony for our 4th graders. Keep an eye out for information coming soon in the Friday folder.

Touching The Sky

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We are happy to say that as of this weekend all of our students have made up or completed their SBAC tests! Several days of this kind of testing brings it’s own challenges to 4th graders, including the academic challenges, and we are proud to say that our students rose to it and persevered!

This week we jumped right back into our regularly scheduled program. We started with wrapping up some math concepts around the formulas for area and perimeter and continued through to our final assessment of Unit 5 on Friday. In Number Corner we have continued to monitor water evaporation and have used that data to practice making line graphs as well as looked at some other geometrical concepts such as rotational symmetry. This kind of symmetry is when a shape rotates around a fixed point but remains the same or mirror image shape. It’s testing our spatial reasoning for sure!

In literacy we have been “poetry detectives” and have worked on finding evidence from poems to figure out what they mean. This is another arena where our students have shown tremendous perseverance. Because reading poetry is a bit more abstract it can be daunting but our students have been working hard to uncover the themes and big ideas of a poem. They had particular success when we looked at theme in contemporary songs, which are a type of poetry in their own right.

In science we tested how compaction impacts structures in our tarpul test. We also used our understanding of weather, erosion, and soil to apply the Engineer Design Process in creating amazing Lego skyscrapers. Students were able to test what different supports best help a structure to survive an earthquake. Our students have loved to work through problems and use what they know to complete these engineering tasks. It’s awesome to watch them make discoveries and develop their scientific thinking through these tasks. Check out the photos and videos!

This coming week we will have NECAP Science testing on Tuesday and Wednesday. We will also have a final math assessment from CSSU called the CRAM before jumping into our last unit of the year. We’ll continue studying poetry and students will have the chance to wrap up their erosion and weathering knowledge in a collaborative project.

Tarpul Testing

Engineers use models to observe, measure and label 

the layers of different lithosphere samples. 

4th graders did an amazing job with SBAC testing this week. We've all nearly completed every section. A few absent students or students who need more time will finish this coming week. We are happy to be moving back into a typical school week although the students certainly did like chewing gum and getting some extra time outside for breaks between testing! :) We have some exciting units to finish out the year.

In the afternoons this past week we continued to work on our science unit about weathering and erosion. We are studying the earth's lithosphere and gathering information for an engineering task of selecting a spot to build a special bridge called a Tarpul. Last week students took model core samples of different sections of the earth's crust to decide where the best soil would be to protect the bridges' anchoring in the river bank.

What can you tell about these soil types?

On Friday we also experienced hands on science with a Four Winds session on plants' and animals' defenses. Students got outside and found examples of these defenses right in the front lawn of WCS!

Next week we will begin our final literacy unit on poetry. Using what we've begun to discuss in our read alouds of Love that Dog and Hate that Cat by Sharon Creech, we will go deeper into what the authors' purpose is and what poems are telling us. We will also continue with our engineering work with the Tarpul and will finish our geometry math unit. The Unit 5 math test will be this coming Friday.

We hope all 4th grade mothers got to share a sweet day with your children!

Productive Presenters

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4th graders were busy this week adjusting back to school after April break. We continued to study geometry in math, including playing a few games with polygons and solving polygon riddles that helped us to think about all that we’ve learned about these shapes. We found and proved “the formula that will always work” for finding the area of a regular quadrilateral through some exploring and hands-on revelations with square inch tiles. We’ll be beginning our May calendar in Number Corner this week which will complement our geometry unit.

Students also spent a great deal of time this week learning more new information about weathering and erosion. To share all that we’ve learned over the last few weeks, students worked in groups to plan, prepare, create and present a variety of creative presentations. Next week, we will be sharing this work with our Mosaic 3rd graders. We had skits, songs, Google slides, game shows, an “Erosion Rocks!” rap and even a puppet show as part of our presentations. The students showed some serious flexibility, creativity and dedication to this work and the end products were very informative and fun to see.

This coming week in the afternoons, we will close our weathering and erosion unit with an engineering task. We’ll be spending a few days learning about a community in Nepal who needs a specific type of bridge to connect them to resources they need, then plan where and how we would build the bridge based on what we’ve learned, and finally build a model.

We will also be taking our SBAC tests this week. Students have spent time the past two weeks preparing and taking practice tests, and are more than ready for the test. This program is just one way that students show what they have learned and the results are helpful to the teachers on Mosaic to adapt our teaching. Please make sure that your child is resting and has a good snack with them for our breaks in the morning.

We ended last week with a scheduled evacuation drill. Our students were S.M.A.R.T. throughout the entire drill and helped to make the whole process move very smoothly. The early morning walk certainly got our blood pumping for a busy Friday!