The Fourth Grade Times

In 4P we have started brainstorming our Fairy Tales! By the time we finished Tale of Despereaux we really understood all of the elements of a Fairy Tale.  This week we focused on conflict, objects, and settings in Fairy Tales.  We started talking about the special characters that are in most fairy tales - like helpers, villains, and heroes. 

In 4S we started structuring our mysteries.  We are continuing with The Westing Game as we begin to outline our stories.  We have been discussing what makes a mystery, and we began to brainstorm some ideas of our own!

In science we have been working on our inventions.  We got our ideas from our inventors logs.  Also, Ms. Kahn went to the National Science teacher convention to talk about moodle.   We go on moodle and type on it.  It’s very cool!  There are lots of interesting inventions.  We will each have a poster board with information about our invention.  On Wednesday we will be standing by our invention and poster to explain our inventions to people.

Congratulations to all of our Freedom Fighters!  The Presentations were amazing! Your hard work paid off and all of your teachers and parents are proud of you!

In Fourth Grade we are still working on fractions.  We have worked on adding and subtracting fractions, and now we can add fractions with different denominators.  The denominator is the number on the bottom and the numerator is the number on the top.  When the bottom numbers are different, we have to change the fractions so that they are the same.  We are also playing a game called Fraction Track.  The goal of the game is to move your piece from the left side of the board and to land exactly on 1!  The game is fun, because you can break apart the fraction into little pieces a bunch of smaller fractions. If you move your game piece to 1 you get to keep the game piece! 

We have started around the world!  Our topic this year is Oceans Around the World.  In Fourth Grade we will be focusing on Ocean Mythology.  We began looking at Greek Mythology.  We talked about the sirens.  Sirens are mytholigical creatures that were half bird and half human.  They would use their beautiful voices to bring the sailors to their rocky island where they live. The sailors’ ship would crash into the rocks and the sirens would eat them!  After that we read the myth of Dolphin Boy. The myth explains that the stars were created to guide sailors. That myth is almost the opposite of the sirens.  It was interesting to to talk about the differences in both of the myths.  After our discussion, we wrote and illustrated our own ocean myths.

In Social Studies before the break, we finished up learning about the 13 Colonies. One of our final activities was Skittles for the King. We each got a certain amount of Skittles and they stood for our income. Then, the tax collectors came around and took a certain fraction of our money, and gave it to the King. Eventually, we had no money left and it showed us how the colonists felt when they got their money taken away in taxes.

Our teachers told us that over break we should think about a freedom fighter we would like to study. When we got back from break, we were told to narrow down our list to three freedom fighters that we were excited about studying. Then we got together with a teacher and chose which freedom fighter was right for us.  

This month in computer, we did typing games online. WE also played Four in a Row, which is a geometry game. We were given a coordinate point and we had to put it where it was supposed to go. We also played a 50 United States game where we dragged states into a blank map of North America. We also did a 13 Colonies quiz on brainpop.com.

We learned the note D in music. Before we went on break, we were given the songs, “Jingle Bells” and “I Had a Little Dreidel” to practice. We were then tested on how well we knew them. Then after the break, we reviewed the songs. We then played with Watermelon Man and Ms. Heydt gave us “When the Saints Go Marching In” to learn. Please help remind us that we need to be practicing our recorders every day for at least a few minutes! Thanks!

We are trying to make circles out of square grid paper. On our first day back in Art, we did puzzles that they did in the Navy. We had to match the puzzles. In our next class, we turned off the lights and we put on our blindfolds. We were sculpting and we had to try to not think of what we were making. We also did not know who we were working with. It felt weird to not know who you were working with or what you were doing, but our sculptures were pretty cool!

We learned double-digit by double-digit multiplication, using the standard algorithm. That’s the way our parents and teachers learned how to multiply, but we got there by learning different steps, like the Box Method, the FOIL Method, and the Four Subproblem Method. Starting as soon as we got back to school after the break, we started geometry, speficially polygons. A polygon is a shape with no rounded sides, all the sides have to connect, and there can’t be a line through the shape. We are also learning a lot of fancy polygon words like isosceles, equilateral, scalene, and quadrilateral.