Dear Families, Welcome back! I hope everyone had a restful and enjoyable spring break. I had a wonderful time listening to everyone’s adventures. We seamlessly transitioned back into our daily routines and fourth grade curriculum. Students took time on Monday to review their Hopes and Dreams from the beginning of the year and then highlight a spring goal to display in the classroom. Check them out! Social Studies This week we started a simulation of a one-room school house called Apple Valley School during our mix it up groups for Social Studies. The students are finding out what it was like to attend a one-room schoolhouse in the late 1800s. Each child has been randomly assigned a new name, age, and family history that they will use during this activity. Even after one period, students have discovered how vastly different school life was during that time period. As mentioned in the email I sent on Tuesday, fourth graders will visit a former one-room schoolhouse and will dress in prairie-era costumes provided here at school. On Friday, we had a visitor come from the one-room school house to provide us with more information about what school was like during that time and what to expect during our visit. Math
Language Arts Poet, Lyn Hoopes, worked with fourth graders to write poetry inspired by the wire dolls made in art class. Below are some photos from her session: Have a wonderful weekend!
Warmly, Brigid Dear Families, A Snow Day, New Bedford Symphony Orchestra field trip, Beauty and the Beast performance, and the 5th grade Wax Museum are just a few events that occurred this past week. At All-School Meeting on Wednesday, we had a student participate in a comedy sketch and two fourth graders helped to kick off the 1st grade Bookworm. As predicted, the week before break was a busy one! Below are a few curriculum highlights: Language Arts We have been using a program called Framing Your Thoughts to enhance our writing. Framing Your Thoughts teaches the fundamentals of sentence writing and paragraph development. The past few weeks we have been taking barebone sentences and adding predicate expanders. A barebone sentence would be The dog runs. Expanding the predicate adds more information about the action and creates a visual in the reader’s mind. Predicate expanders tell us more about the Where? Why? When? and How?. Students have also practiced adding physical characteristics to the subject. Each student added two predicate expanders and two physical descriptions to the barebone sentence: The dog runs. Here is what they came up with:
Social Studies
Math
I hope everyone has a wonderful spring break! Warmly, Brigid |
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May 2019
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