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.