Ms. Mawani
Agenda Messages: May 31, 2019 Websites to help you study for our Science quiz: Simple Machines Simple Machines Bill Nye: Simple Machines Pulleys Pulleys Ramps Gears June 7, 2019 Homework: Parts of a Flower /Why do Plants Matter journal pages due on Monday. AMA comparing fractions card game. May 30, 2019 Science Quiz next week We are learning about fractions. Please return Health homework by Monday of next week. May 21, 2019 We will be starting our Health lessons tomorrow. If you do not want your child to participate in these lessons, please ensure you return your form tomorrow. May 16, 2019 Social Studies Homework is due on Thursday of next week. May 14, 2019 Please bring in recycled materials for our design challenge in Science. Math homework is due on Tuesday. Check out the Math Shed for some videos related to Math. PD Day on Friday. May 7, 2019 Fieldtrip to Glenbow Ranch is tomorrow. Dress for the weather. April 30, 2019 1. Math Homework is due on Friday. 2. AMA my hip hop performance. 3. Think about an idea for your instructional writing and bring some ideas on Thursday. 4. Fieldtrip forms due on Monday April 26th, 2019 1. AMA our levers experiment. 2. We will be performing our hip hop dance routines on Monday during Gym. 3. Fieldtrip forms will be handed out on Monday. April 12, 2019 1. AMA our animal collage artwork! 2. Math Fact Families and French homework due on Monday. Friday, March 8, 2019 1. AMA today's art lesson. Tuesday, March 5, 2019 1. AMA our field trip to Winsport! 2. Students are encouraged to hydrate after the field trip to prevent illness and injury. Monday, February 25, 2019 1. We are examining how optical devices work. 2. Pink Shirt Day is on Wednesday. 3. No School on Friday. Tuesday, February 19, 2019 1. AMA what we have learned about refraction. 2. We know different ways to represent multiplication. They include skip counting, repeated addition, equal groups, arrays, and base ten blocks. Tuesday, February 12, 2019 Students in our class are welcome to hand out Valentines Day cards tomorrow. Here is a list of students: Amina, Cammeron, Syeesha, Emma, Blake, Zehna, Morgan, Alexa, Kelsie, Huda, Keiena, Inaya, Jemimah, Marina Jack, Arthur, Basil, Azmain, Owies, Max, James, James W, Tristan, Tony, Faithful Monday, February 11, 2019 1. If students would like to participate in our Secret Buddy Exchange, please email me, and send forms in tomorrow at the latest. They can bring something in tomorrow to give to a buddy which I will assign them in the morning. 2. AMA equal sharing and grouping. 3. Teacher's Convention is on Thursday and Friday so there will be no school on these days. Tuesday, January 22, 2019 1. Please bring in a Pringles container next weekas we will be making kaleidoscopes with them. 2. Please return Ski/Snowboard fieldtrip forms as well as Report Card envelopes. 3. We started using Duolingo for practice with French. Friday, January 18, 2019 1. Please return Ski/Snowboard Fieldtrip forms by Tuesday January 22nd. 2. Brainstorm a onomatopoeia word for our alphabet project 3. We finished our lanterns this week. Thanks for all your hard work students! Friday, January 11, 2019 We started our vision boards today. We also had a compliments and concerns meeting where we discussed strategies for working quietly. Wednesday, January 9, 2019 We will be setting goals for ourselves. Students are encouraged to bring in some photos and quotes from magazines in order to create a vision board. We watched this short animation and related it to goal setting: One Small Step Tuesday, January 8, 2019 We are learning about mindfulness in the class. Today we began learning about the three parts of the brain: the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the amygdala. This week we explored fractions and examples of where they are found in the world. We thought about parts of a whole (dividing food, land, the clock, music) and parts of a set (our class, bowling pins, our plants that are germinating). We also began comparing fractions with similar and different denominators. We will continue working on naming, recording, comparing and ordering fractions next week. We also continued writing stories. You may have heard of these stories as we used the Photobooth app to take pictures that twist and change our faces, and then wrote stories about how this might have happened. In Science, we began creating observations of our bean seeds by taking photographs. We also dissected flowers in Science. Next week we will continue our exploration of plant growth and changes. We worked in teams on a design challenge. Our task was to design and construct a device that could be used if we were on a deserted island and needed to solve problems that may occur. This was inspired by The Swiss Family Robinson.
We also got into teams of 3 and built catapults (a lever) and launched marshmallows across the Hawksnest. We tested each catapult 3 times and found the average of the 3 attempts. This involved using long division. We finished our procedural writing pieces. Take a look at some of our finished pieces. Next week we will continue working on our design challenges with our groups. s We went to Glenbow Ranch this week. There were lots of wonderful connections made to our learning in Social Studies and Science. We discovered the prairie crocus, a flower native to our local community, as well as the Aspen tree. We also saw fossils in the rock, bee boxes, cattle, and more. Check out our photos. Next week, we will continue learning about Alberta, specifically about it's history and about the arrival of another group of people to Alberta. We will also continue learning about division in math and create our own procedural texts. . This week in Math, we continued to develop our problem solving skills related to multiplication and division. We looked at some challenging problems and then shared our strategies. Take a look at the question below see what types of questions we've been exploring. Can you see where we needed to use multiplication and division?
In Science, we explored levers with the question, what happens when you increase the length of the effort arm on a lever. We tried this out by experimenting. We discovered that when you increase the length of the effort arm, the force is reduced (meaning, you need less force to lift a load). We also refined our hip hop dances in gym. We worked in groups and tried to synchronize our dance moves. We spent much of our time this week learning about division. Students participated in a scavenger hunt around the school to solve problems related to equal sharing and grouping. The hunt involved moving from location to location and looking at a real world situation that required using division to solve them. Students were presented with scenarios about people and objects and asked to use specific strategies to share or split them into equal groups, including using base ten blocks, repeated subtraction, arrays and more. As they completed each problem they received a piece of a code that they would have to unscramble once they had solved all of the problems. Students worked in groups and at one location had to knock the number of times as their answer at the last location to be granted access to the room. Each team tried to get back to the classroom first and unscramble the code that they had received.
We also continued learning about simple machines. Students were given the task of creating a device that had wheels and axles and could move against the force of friction. Take a look at some of our devices in the gallery. Our ski and snowboard fieldtrip was this week and students had a great week at Winsport learning and practicing skills at their levels. Our grade four students showed a growth mindset each day that they headed onto the slopes. For some it was there first time on skis and snowboards! The progress each of them made was incredible to see and by the end of day on Thursday, they were bounding and shredding down the hills with ease.
Friday, March 1, 2019
We learned how optical devices work in Science. Students worked at centres to look at these, and think about how light allows them to work. In Social Studies, we explored what historians do and what lenses they look through to understand the past. These lenses include, We also read the book, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, which is a speech made by Chief Seattle, which lets us understand the Indigenous point of view. We will continue looking at picture books, after our Ski and Snowboard week to learn more about Indigenous culture. We also continued practicing 2 and 3 digit by 1 digit multiplication in math. Next week we will be skiing and snowboarding at Winsport! Another short week but another one packed with learning! We explored how light bends by working at stations where we could observe refraction. We also observed the position of the sun at different times of day and watched how our shadows changed and measured them. In Art we created a landscape for a region of Alberta. We used our research to include the vegetation, landforms and animal life. We read I Am Not A Number by Jenny Kay Dupuis, about a girl whose way of life changes when she attends a residential school. We will be exploring this story further next week and looking at what a historian does. We will also be learning strategies for 2 digit by 1 digit multiplication in math.
Here are some great websites to help students study for the Science quiz which is on Friday: Refraction: Broken Pencil Demonstration Refraction: Inverted Arrow Demonstration Refraction It was a short week! We learned a multiplication game to help us practice our basic facts. We also started to look at the question, "How can we share and group things flexibly in our everyday lives?" Students have been learning how to represent multiplication using equal groups, skip counting, repeated addition and base ten blocks. In Science, we began learning about simple machines.
This week we continued working on routines as part of gymnastics in the gym. Next week we will have an assembly. We also met our kindergarten buddies and worked with them to make groundhogs for Groundhog Day. In Social Studies we are creating Field Journals and imagining what it would be like to explore our region of Alberta. We are using our jot notes to help us record our "experiences" in it. We also continued working on our Book Talks and talked about Growth Mindset in Health.
This week our class spent time creating vision boards that represent our goals for 2019. On our vision boards we have included two personal goals and two school related goals. Students are encouraged to hang their vision boards up so that they can see what their goals are and be inspired to work on them.
In Science we learned about transparent, translucent and opaque objects. Transparent objects allow light or prevent light from passing through them. We also completed an experiment to observe how light travels. It travels in a straight line! We continued estimating sums to the nearest tens and hundreds place and solving word problems in Math. We finished making our lanterns, and they look amazing! Next week we will be continuing to experiment with light and shadow, working on our book talks and we will be creating onomatopoeia art. We’re back at school after a wonderful winter break and have learned plenty already! We learned all about onomatopoeia in Language Arts. Onomatopoeia is used to imitate sounds and they make our writing more interesting. Some examples are: woof, quack, pow, ka-blam, crash, and boom. We made a comic page about our winter break using onomatopoeia words.These will be on display during our School Literacy Night. In Health, we started the Mind Up curriculum and learned about our brains. We have a prefrontal cortex, an amygdala, and a hippocampus. We learned how all three of these work together. We also started thinking about our goals for 2019 and collected photos and quotes for our vision boards. We are learning how to estimate sums in Math. We estimate sums when we want to add up numbers efficiently. For example we might do this when we are buying two or more things at a store. In Gym, we started gymnastics. We are moving throughout the gym to different stations to practice our skills. Next week we will continue learning about light and shadow with demonstrations and experiments. One will explore how light travels while the other will be about how light interacts with transparent, translucent and opaque objects. We will also finish our lanterns. In Music, we will be learning how to play recorders. This week has been short but great!
We've been doing a lot of great work during Book Talks. Each of us is in a group where we've been learning a variety of comprehension strategies including Inferring and Visualizing. In Math, Ms. Erskine has been teaching students how to compare and order numbers to 10, 000. In Science, we're reflecting on what we learned at the landfill last week and creating a comic strip in Comic Life. We're also working on researching a region of Alberta in Social Studies. Next week we will be organizing ourselves for MoFOb. We can't wait for you to see what we've been up to for the past month. This week, we learned so much! We kicked off the week by learning all about the news that was sweeping our city: the vote to bid or not to bid for the Olympics. We explored the pros and the cons of this opportunity and then students participated in a class plebiscite. The votes are in and the class voted 14 to 9 in favour of the Olympics being hosted in Calgary. We are writing opinion pieces about this topic as well. We also went to the Shepherd Landfill on Tuesday and well, we can't really talk about it on this blog. It was top secret...I've said too much. But, we learned a lot about waste and composting while there. Ask your students to tell you more. We'll be creating comic strips to represent what we learned. For now, you can see a few undercover photos below. In math, we have been learning how to represent, compare and order numbers to 10,000. Next week we'll be preparing for our Museum of Forgotten Objects and learning more about comparing and ordering numbers to 10, 000. We'll also have an Earth Rangers presentation on Tuesday morning. Parent Teacher Conferences will be held on Thursday and Friday of next week. Please sign up.
This week we began thinking about the story behind our forgotten objects. We brainstormed how much they had meant to us before we put them away and forgot about them. Soon, we will be preparing poems about our forgotten objects.
We also began book talks after choosing a book that we wanted to read. We are working in small groups to read and respond to these books. Ask your child what book they have chosen to read. Next week we will be reading more from our books. In Math, we are solving open ended problems related to patterns and relations. We are also learning how to participate in math talks. Next week we take up Number concepts. This week was a busy week! The story, One Grain of Rice by Demi presented us a very engaging math problem and we found ourselves seeing double! Ask your child about the story and how we solved this math challenge.
We also had a guest presenter from Living Soil come in to teach us all about vermicomposting. Did you know that worms can't eat spicy foods? To wrap up a great week we hosted a poetry jam. Teachers and Mr. MacDonald presented poems about forgotten objects. These forgotten objects included a toy, a torn glove, a notebook, a video game controller, a book and a Cuttlebug. Other activities included saying "See ya!" to our decomposition chambers. We recorded both quantitative and qualitative data to complete this lab. In each chamber, we saw a reduction in the mass of the organic waste. We also completed art inspired by fall, learned more fall, Halloween and colour words in French, and learned about similes and metaphors. Next week, students will be learning more about figurative language and will be creating their own poems about forgotten objects. Students, please bring in your forgotten object by Tuesday so that we can begin. Remember, no surf boards please. Your object should be something you can fit into your backpack. We watched an IKEA commercial called Lamp. It made us feel sorry for the lamp that was thrown out with the trash. Afterwards, we completed a journal page about the lamp and thought about the main message that the ad was communicating. We will be starting an inquiry on forgotten objects as part of Language Arts and Science.
In Science we also learned about food chains and the role of decomposers as part of it. In French we started to learn about Fall and Halloween vocabulary. We also started complementary courses this week. Students went to different teachers to learn about an area of interest such as cartooning, digital story telling, drama, etc.
|
We began a new novel read aloud this week called City of Ember. We read the first two chapters as a class together.
In Science, we researched what goes where when we are looking at waste created in our homes. We learned about what's recyclable, compostable and what ends up in the garbage. We also explored our lunch to evaluate how environmentally friendly it was. We considered various things when doing this such as whether containers were reusable or recyclable, the packaging of certain snack foods, and how we deal with food that we don't want to eat. Students realized they could take this food home to compost or eat later. We also began creating decomposition chambers to explore how decomposers work on organic waste. Here are some links to videos we watched related to Waste and Our World: Zero Waste Town and Kids Go Undercover to Discover Food Waste in Their Homes
In Math, we learned about elapsed time to help us think about when we use time everyday.
Next week we will continue reading City of Ember as well as evaluate waste that results from packaging. We we will also take a closer look at the regions of Alberta. In Math, we'll begin patterns.
In Science, we researched what goes where when we are looking at waste created in our homes. We learned about what's recyclable, compostable and what ends up in the garbage. We also explored our lunch to evaluate how environmentally friendly it was. We considered various things when doing this such as whether containers were reusable or recyclable, the packaging of certain snack foods, and how we deal with food that we don't want to eat. Students realized they could take this food home to compost or eat later. We also began creating decomposition chambers to explore how decomposers work on organic waste. Here are some links to videos we watched related to Waste and Our World: Zero Waste Town and Kids Go Undercover to Discover Food Waste in Their Homes
In Math, we learned about elapsed time to help us think about when we use time everyday.
Next week we will continue reading City of Ember as well as evaluate waste that results from packaging. We we will also take a closer look at the regions of Alberta. In Math, we'll begin patterns.
This week we started the novel read aloud, The Van Gogh Cafe by Cynthia Rylant. It is about a cafe where magical things happen. We have read a chapter each day!
We also went looking for examples of waste at our school, and captured photos of what we noticed.
As well we've started learning about time to the hour and half hour.
Welcome to Grade 4! It's been an engaging first week in our new classroom. Here's what we've been up to:
Creating our Classroom Community - we've been thinking about the kind of classroom we would like to have. As part of this we have brainstormed how we can be successful this year, what we can to do in order to help our classroom run smoothly and what we would like to learn.
Reading - we've been practicing how to build our reading stamina through daily Read to Self time. We've also been reading great picture books this week such as What Matters, Do Unto Otters and The Great Kapok Tree.
Team Building and Collaboration - we completed the Spaghetti Tower Challenge! All of our teams did really well, and we discussed the benefits and challenges of collaboration afterwards. Here's a link to the challenge: Build a tower, build a team
Math - we read the Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and explored the ways that math is part of our everyday life.
Time Capsules - we began writing letters to our Future Self that will be returned back to students at the end of Grade 4.
Wow! We sure did hit the ground running. Stay tuned for more updates from our Grade 4 class.
Creating our Classroom Community - we've been thinking about the kind of classroom we would like to have. As part of this we have brainstormed how we can be successful this year, what we can to do in order to help our classroom run smoothly and what we would like to learn.
Reading - we've been practicing how to build our reading stamina through daily Read to Self time. We've also been reading great picture books this week such as What Matters, Do Unto Otters and The Great Kapok Tree.
Team Building and Collaboration - we completed the Spaghetti Tower Challenge! All of our teams did really well, and we discussed the benefits and challenges of collaboration afterwards. Here's a link to the challenge: Build a tower, build a team
Math - we read the Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and explored the ways that math is part of our everyday life.
Time Capsules - we began writing letters to our Future Self that will be returned back to students at the end of Grade 4.
Wow! We sure did hit the ground running. Stay tuned for more updates from our Grade 4 class.