The Prairie (Video from the Nature Museum)

November 24, 2014

Students were very excited to receive their Bibles two weeks ago at our Bible ceremony. You can see pictures from that below. We learned last week how to use them to look up verses, and today I explained how we'll be creating a Jesse Tree during Advent. Each student has a story that they should summarize and create a symbol for, and these will be due throughout the month of December. The Jesse Tree traces the family tree of Jesus, beginning with the creation of the Earth and Adam and Eve, leading all the way up to the stories in the New Testament about Jesus' birth.

We're almost done reading The Bad Beginning. We've been talking lately about how we can look for certain signs in the reading, such as "again and again" and "aha moments" to help us understand what's happening in the text. Once we're done with this book, we'll begin a unit focusing on non-fiction.

I've been loving the students' writing lately! We've been working on several persuasive essays. The most recent one was written from the point of view of a turkey in disguise. I was impressed by all the humor and the sentence variety in these! We'll keep on working on persuasive writing in December.

In math, we're doing a unit on tables, graphs, and data. Many students are already very familiar with how to read graphs, so hopefully it'll be a nice brain break before we start fractions. This unit is very short, so I expect our test to be Thursday, December 11. This may change based on how quickly the students grasp the material, though.

We've been continuing learning how to read maps in social studies. We made our own maps of the classroom last Friday, with an X marking "treasure" that students had hidden. Students then switched maps and had to use their new map to find the other group's treasure. We'll also have a test on this the second week of December, on Friday, December 12. Students will need to know the continents and oceans, as well as how to read a map.

Finally, in science, we had a great time at the Nature Museum on Friday! We took iPads with us, and students worked in groups to take pictures that will help them create a movie about ecosystems today. We'll take our test tomorrow, and then begin a unit on weather in December.

November 10, 2014

One of our most news from this past week is that all of the students have become bloggers! We are using a site called Kidblog, which you can find here. This is a very safe site, since only users that I register can log in and read or comment on the students' writing. Our first blog entry was what it's like to be 9 (or 10), but I'm excited to see many students publishing their own writing, too.

In science, we're learning about ecosystems, and we have a field trip to the Nature Museum next week on Friday the 21st that will tie in perfectly with this! In social studies, we're just beginning our unit on maps. The students will learn how to read longitude and latitude and use a map scale, compass, and key. We'll also take part in the National Geographic Geography Bee in December, completing the preliminary round in our classroom. If you'd like to get a preview of the questions (and begin practicing) you can find the website here.

This Friday, we'll be attending  a Bible ceremony where all fourth graders will receive their own Bible. We'll be keeping them at school since we'll be learning how to look up verses in the next few weeks, but these Bibles will be for the students to keep. They'll take the Bibles with them to fifth grade next year, and then can keep them once they graduate.

Finally, in math, I expect the students to take their math test next week on Wednesday. It will cover long division, two digit multiplication, and word problems. We're going to be spending several lessons this week on word problems, so that students become more comfortable with them and better problem solvers.

Below, you can see pictures from the Halloween Fun Fair, our craft time with our buddies, and the students' ofrendas.