Week of September 20th

It's official, Room 213 has found its MOJO. After being in school for four weeks, having two full weeks of classes back to back, and diving into our curriculum in all subjects, we are now knee-deep into 4th grade. In fact, we have even finished our first two units.

We completed our Bullying unit in Second Step and have moved onto Empathy. We are learning what it is to be empathetic and to walk in someone else's shoes and how that truly allows us to know how they are feeling. We also completed our first math unit. I tested the kids on big numbers, multi-digit addition and subtraction, and place value concepts. We will begin our first 'switch unit' (kids are split between the five classroom teachers and the DST) on Monday and it will actually be quite a long unit as we focus on both multiplication and division. We begin the unit by studying factors and multiples, important concepts to help solidify understanding of multiplication and division.

I was able to get two science experiments in as well as giving the kids a chance to show me (and you via Seesaw) what they have learned about the water cycle. During the lessons we replicated rain on our soil and also created our first stream to analyze the affect that water has on land and land on water. We collected runoff from our stream tables and were able to visually see the erosion that took place as we had sediment that was washed into our graduated cylinders. Needless to say, there was quite a lot of commotion during the lesson which I call 'good noise'. In the upcoming weeks, we will continue to conduct experiments that teach us how land and water interact.

Our reading and writing units are gaining traction as well. In writing, we discussed coming up with ideas for stories by thinking about small moments in our own lives, stories we'd like to see on book shelves, and paying attention to, and observing, the world around us. For reading, we talked about reading intensely and everything that entails. We also practiced summarizing and synthesizing material we just finished reading. We can retell using chronological order or we can retell by discussing the main parts of what we just read and how they fit with other important parts of the story that we previously read. Either way, I want the kids to understand that we must move beyond decoding and focus primarily on comprehension.

We participated in a fun STEM project on Wednesday (check out STEM tab if you haven't already) building card towers as tall as possible. Also this week, the kids completed the round of MAP testing for the fall. On that note, I want to give a BIG shout out to all the kids in my room as they took it seriously and appeared to try to perform to the best of their ability, which is really all they can control.

I look forward to another fun and productive week. It starts out nicely with an author's visit from Kate Hannigan, The League of Secret Heroes, Monday afternoon in the auditorium. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!