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!

Erosion Experts

This week in Mosaic we developed our understanding of weathering and erosion by doing various scientific investigations to discover how these two forces shape our Earth overtime.  On Thursday we had a wonderful trip out to the Allen Brook to observe how erosion is happening right in our own community.  This upcoming week students will use their new knowledge that they have gathered about weathering and erosion, in which they will perform a science inquiry task about how weathering and erosion changes sand dunes change overtime.  In groups students will collect data and then analyze it using a graph, they will also convey their understanding by writing a strong prediction about what they think will happen throughout the task and reflection about their learning and what they observed throughout the investigation.

In literacy students are working on wrapping up their personal essays.  The last steps of editing and organizing their essays are pushing them to go back through their work to create a polished final draft.  We will be submitting students' personal essays to be published in the Scribe, the school's literary journal; it's produced each spring and has a collection of artwork and exemplary writing pieces from student authors.

In other news, on Thursday we watched the spectacular middle school production of Shrek! Students loved this play and many of them told me how much they look forward to participating in the play next year!

We ended the week by celebrating the arrival of Mrs. Parker's baby boy, William Stone. He was born at 2:16 on 4/8/16 , which is a pretty cool mathematical birthday! Congrats to Mrs. Parker and her family.

Processes That Shape Our Earth

   

Thanks to all of the families and friends who came to join us on passion project morning! It was a great opportunity for both students and families to connect and share their experiences.  Each project that the students presented were ones that they passionately chose and took pride in.   Giving students the opportunity to choose projects that expanded their knowledge and creativity was really rewarding for both the teachers and students. 

  This week we continued to work hard on writing our personal essays.  Students learned more about how to structure and format a five paragraph essay.  They also were encouraged to include transitional words throughout their essays.  We learned about how to create a strong our readers.  We are looking forward to wrapping up these essays in the coming week and submitting them to the Scribe for a chance to be published authors!

     We started a new unit in theme this week focused around the processes that shape our Earth.  There were a lot of great discussions about what “shape” meant when connecting it to our world and how it means something different than when we would use the word “shape” in math class.  Students were introduced to the concepts of weathering and erosion and will 

continue to explore them more throughout this unit.  They used their new understandings to determine how land formations such as canyons, valleys, and sand dunes are formed.  We are excited to do lots of scientific investigations about weathering and erosion in the upcoming weeks! Eventually students will use their new understanding to engineer a tarpul that will solve a problem for a fictional family in Nepal that we will read about. 

    During our read aloud time we are reading Sharon Creech's Love That Dog. This is a new (and challenging) genre for students because the narrator tells his story through prose. They have many questions about how and why the author would choose to do that and throughout the reading we have also read several of the works of famous poets that are mentioned throughout the text. We are looking forward to seeing how the book will be interpreted in play form when we attend the performance at the Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center next week! 

Sugaring With Shumlin

We were fortunate to start the week at the Yandow's Maple Sugar operation with Vermont's own Governor Shumlin. It was a chilly wet morning, but Mosaic represented WCS with their SMART thinking and behavior. We even made the local news and Williston Observer! Here are some photos of the day.

Mosaic Team Photo!

This week we have been hard at work on our Passion Projects. Students have been researching their topic and we discussed ways to search online safely and efficiently. Then we discussed how researchers skim passages looking for answers to their questions. Next students used their questions to create subheadings and organize their reports in a Google Doc template. Once their report is written they will use that information to create a presentation. Some will make trifolds or posters, while others will create Google slide presentations. We are looking forward to sharing our passion projects with you next Tuesday, March 22nd at 8:00am. 

If you would like to sign up for a spring conference you can do so on the Important Dates sidebar of the blog. Just click on your student's teacher's link and follow the directions to secure a time.  We look forward to chatting with you next week. 

Eager Essayists

The "snow" day made for an odd  first week back, but we made the most of our three days together and the students continued with their work writing personal essays.Up until this point  they have really only been focusing on writing strong paragraphs or longer informational writing pieces. Now they are being asked to write an opinion piece that includes not only five structured paragraphs, but also uses elaboration, details, and stories within to build an essay that includes voice and detail,

This is challenging stuff, so the way that we break it down is Liz teaches the lessons on structure and organization. We use a baking analogy to say that she is going to teach how to make their essay "look" good. Then Jess teaches the lessons on writer's craft; teaching them how to make it "taste" good, too.

We began the week by having students use prompts to write as much as they could about their opinion on the importance of homework. It was amazing to see how much more they could write with the help of phrases like:
Some people think...but I think....
As I write this I realize...
An example of this is...

Then the students went back in and mined through all of their writing to find a seed idea that they wanted to grow into a longer essay. To do this they asked themselves some questions about the big ideas that kept coming up in their writing...
What topics do I keep writing about?
Why is this piece so important? What could it teach my reader about me?

Once students had this seed idea they used it to think about they REALLY wanted to say about this topic. This took lots of wordsmithing until it sounded exactly the way they wanted it to sound. Here are some of our thesis statements that we will use to write longer personal essays:

Sports are an important part of my life.
My old house is where all of my memories began.
My dog has a great personality.
My father is a caring person.

Next week our essays will begin to take shape and develop into what will most likely be the strongest and most challenging writing pieces they have ever written.

We are also working on our Passion Projects during our theme time which combines reading, note taking, research, writing, and creating. We look forward to sharing our hard work with you at our Passion Project Presentation Breakfast on the morning of Tuesday, March 22.

Conferences will be held at the end of this month on several different days. Please click on your child's teacher's wiki signup on the side bar of the blog under important dates if you would like a conference for the spring.