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.