“Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year.
The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple...”
- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Reading and Writing Workshop
Reading is thinking, and that will be one of our mantras this year in fourth grade! As readers, we use strategies to comprehend and actively engage in text. Students will be learning how to apply these strategies in class during interactive read alouds and during independent reading. Some of the strategies will include visualizing, questioning, inferring, making predictions, and making connections. Students will also be learning to leave “tracks of their thinking” as they tune into their “inner voice” or their “inner conversation” with the text. Both fiction and nonfiction texts will be used to address purposes for reading and text structures. To enhance and deepen comprehension, students will enhance their metacognitive skills as they "Stop, Think, and React!" to text.
Our first read aloud of the school year is Katherine Applegate's Wish Tree. This charming, whimsical, and touching story is told from a wise old tree's perspective, and addresses such important themes as respecting differences, community, and friendship. In addition to being a beautiful work of fiction, readers learn interesting information about trees, animals, and the natural world.
Following our reading of Wish Tree, we will begin Kate DiCamillo’s TheTiger Rising. This poignant and thought-provoking piece of realistic fiction is going to provide a “jumping off point” for many of our mini-lessons during Reader’s Workshop. During this unit, we will focus on interpreting text and reading intensely to grow ideas about character development, traits, and motivations, mood, and theme. Students will be asked to think deeply about complex characters and issues, and defend their thinking with evidence from the text.
We've also been focusing on ways to choose books and selecting "Just Right" books to read in class. "Just Right" books are comfortable, but provide us with opportunities to stop and think about what we're reading. Whether there's new vocabulary to learn in context or inferences we have to make by connecting our background knowledge to the text, it's important that the book selections we make give us some food for thought! We're going to continue to work on not only making appropriate book selections, but we're also going to strive to read a variety of genres during Reader's Workshop to expand our reading horizons!
This year, the students will be immersed in a variety of literacy experiences, and they will be engaged in the research process as well. We are set to launch Writer’s Workshop and our first unit of study will be on the qualities of effective opinion writing. It is imperative that the students view themselves as authentic writers with their own stories, ideas, thoughts, and feelings to express and share.
It’s also important that, as writer’s, students engage in the process of writing and learn the craft. With a focus on mentor texts, students will analyze the writing style of authors such as Kate DiCamillo, Ingrid Law, Jane Yoland, Sandra Cisneros, and others. It's so important for the students to appreciate the connection between reading and writing, and to recognize that reading helps you become a better writer!
Our fourth grade mathematicians have just completed their first Illustrative Math unit on Factors and Multiples. During this unit students extended their knowledge of multiplication, division, and the area of a rectangle to deepen their understanding of factors and to learn about multiples.
In this unit, students returned to the concept of area to make sense of factors and multiples of numbers. Given a rectangle with a particular area, students find as many pairs of whole-number side lengths as they can. They make sense of those side lengths as factor pairs of the whole-number area, and the area as a multiple of each side length. Students also learn that a number can be classified as prime or composite based on the number of factor pairs it has.
Throughout the unit, students encounter various contexts related to school, gatherings, and celebrations. They are intended to invite conversations about students’ lives and experiences. Consider them as opportunities to learn about students as individuals, to foster a positive learning community, and to shape each lesson based on insights about students.
We are now moving on to Fraction Action! Our mathematicians will be exploring the size of fractions, equivalency, and comparison. Here is a link to the Unit 2 Parent Letter for more information!
Fourth graders just launched our first science unit, Energy. During this unit, students will investigate three forms of energy: Motion Energy, Thermal Energy, and Electric Energy. Each of these units included first-hand, guided explorations where students learned to describe energy in everyday phenomena. Our focus question throughout this unit is “Where does the energy come from?” and “Where does the energy go?” Students will be learning how to track the flow of energy in increasingly complex scenarios and investigations. They will be introduced to the Energy Tracking Lens, a framework in the first unit which is a set of questions that guides students through the process of "telling the energy story." This engaging and hands-on science unit will no doubt ENERGIZE our fourth grade scientists!