Feb 11 - 15

A Few Reminders:

• Feb 19 - Spellathon Forms due. LISTS ARE HERE! 
• Feb 21 - Spell-A-Thon test day!
• Feb 22 - Wellness Day (pm)
• Feb 25 - Grade 4's at Rabbit Hill for Day 2! 
• Feb 26 - BOKS Family Night!
• Feb 27 - Pink Shirt Day 
• Feb 28 - Spell-A-Thon Wrap up!

Hopefully we get a little bit warmer weather this week! Please make sure everyone comes dressed to school with hats, touques, mitts and snowpants! 

ELA 

We have been busy in 4B! Students are still working on making different connections to text. The three ways we can connect to text are Text to Self, Text to Text and Text to World. We created an interactive journal page, and students spent some time reading picture books, working on making these connections. 

MATH 

This week we have begun our multiplication unit! This week students were re-introduced to arrays. This is something they would have see in Grade 3 already, and can be used as a method on solving multiplication problems. 

Students worked in pairs, rolling die, creating multiplication sentences and drawing the correlating array. 

 We also discussed how skip counting on a number line, and repeated addition can be used to solve multiplication problems.

SCIENCE
We are beginning our Building Devices unit! Students will use what they learned from our Wheels & Levers unit and put it to work by building different items. Please see this letter, which was emailed to parents about donating supplies for this project.

Students will be "hired" by a Toy Company, to design different toys with specific purposes. First, we have to look at what makes a good toy! Students analyzed different toys, and came up with the pros and cons that each has. 

Next week, we will begin to get into groups and plan our devices. 

SOCIAL 

Our projects are done! Students will spend some time reviewing projects in peer groups. 

Here's is a quick peek at what they have been working on! 

Riverview Visit

I am sure you heard about it, but our breakfast visit was AWESOME! All the students were super excited to see Riverview and all it has to offer, They started with a breakfast of pancakes and bacon in the gym. A BIG THANK YOU to the RMS Staff who cooked for us! We were stuffed!  

 Afterwards Grade 7's from leadership took them on guided tours around the school. 

ART 

We are working on some beautiful art! Using chalk pastels and student created stencils, students are creating some Northern Lights Masterpieces! 

Jan 28 - Feb 6

A Few Reminders:

• Feb 11 - 13 - Skating Week )9:45 - 10:15 every morning.).
• Feb 14 - RMS Pancake Breakfast 
• Feb 18 - Family Day No School
• Feb 19 - Spellathon Forms due. LISTS ARE HERE! 
• Feb 22 - Wellness Day (pm)
• Feb 27 - Pink Shirt Day 

Our Week in Review!

ELA 

This week in language arts we were all about Making Connections to Text! This can be done in three different ways; Text to Self, Text to Text and Text to World. I find the easiest one to work through with students is Text to Self. 

I read aloud an old favourite, Alexander and the Terrible, Nog Good, Very Bad day. This is a book I think every student can relate to at some point (myself included)! Once we read, we identified the different problems Alexander experienced in his day. 

Then I asked the students to think of a part of the book that reminded them of a personal experience. This is how we make Text to Self connections. We ask questions such as:

• What does this story remind you of?
• Can you relate to the characters in the story?
• Does anything in this story remind you of your own life?

Students responded on Padlet, with an experience they related to explaining how and why. 

We will continue to work on this skill independently during read to self time. 

During KidBlog, we have begun to start Peer Review time. As a class, we created a rubric based on the descriptors.

Once students have completed their work, we "spin the wheel" to Peer Review. The student selected reads their paragraph to the class, and we work together to edit and give them a verbal mark. 

We have also started to work with word sums! This is part of our Morphology and Structured Word Inquiry work, where we work with word parts to discover the meaning for spelling. In previous months, we have gone over what different word parts are. 

Students created word part cards, made up of base words, prefixes and suffixes and started making up some word sums!

 

As we introduce different prefixes and suffixes, we discuss their meaning 

i.e. -ed added to the end of a word implies it is past tense and been done, whereas - ing implies that action is currently happening. We will continue to practice this skill, as we learn more spelling rules!

MATH

As a little brain breather, we have been working with time! Students have been working with how to tell time based on 12 and 24 hour clocks. They did great with counting minutes by 5, but really struggled when it came to counting minutes by 1! 

SCIENCE 

We finished up Wheels & Levers! This is a quick informational unit with demonstrations. Students worked to take their own visual notes. The last couple of simple machines we looked at where Wedges and Pulleys! Students worked independently to determine the different types of Pulley Systems and added to their notes. 

We did a Kahoot to check in on their unit knowledge!

SOCIAL

Students have been working extremely hard on their Regions Unit Project!! I have to say I am super impressed with their work! After weeks of research, creating an interactive map on MyMaps, they have their final product! Each student has recorded their reports via Screencastify and given virtual tours of their Alberta Maps! 

STAY TUNED FOR THE FINAL PROJECTS TO BE 

Jan 21-24

A Few Reminders: 

• January 28 - Grade 4's go to Rabbit Hill! Please fill out the permission forms online. 
• January 28 - Raptor Spiritwear store is open online!
• Girls Floor Hockey has started. Practices are Mondays and Wesnesdays after school (3:15pm - 4:15pm). 
• January 31 - REPORT CARDS ARE ON POWERSCHOOL. We will not be sending home printed versions, please check online to view your child's progress. Don't forget to check assignment comments, there is a lot of information there. 
• January 31 - Outdoor Ed Meeting after school (members only)
• Feb 1 - No School PD Day 
• Feb 7 & 8 - No School Teacher's Convention
• Feb 11 - 13 - Skating Week )9:45 - 10:15 every morning.).
• Feb 14 - RMS Pancake Breakfast 
• Feb 18 - Family Day No School 
• Feb 22 - Wellness Day (pm)
• Feb 27 - Pink Shirt Day 

ELA

Our grammar focus this week was on the difference between common and proper nouns. We discuss this often in our daily writing, and took time this week to determine the difference in hopes that students continue to apply this knowledge into their writing. 

My favourite way to get our brains moving is to have the students discover their own learning. I gave them 24 different cards with words on them and let them come up with their own sorting rules. This was my first year where every group sorted them into noun groups - person, place and thing! Some things must be sticking!!!

Next, I asked them to look at the words and sort them into two groups based on how they look. The secret here is that some of the words were capitalized, proper nouns (Alberta, Mrs. Green, Lion King). Others we common nouns (province, teacher, movie). This time, only one group noticed this! Once I told students the rule, they went about matching the proper noun to the common noun. 

A Proper noun names a specific person, place or thing. Every word in the name or title is capitalized. 

A common noun is the general name for a person, place or thing. 

During Read to Self, students were given a Google Doc to record any proper nouns they could find, and then determine what common noun group they may belong to. 

During our WeSearch Wednesday students are using the skills we have worked on over the year to research a topic of their choice - sort of! The one tiny catch is that I had them choose any topic from a site of my choice, PowerKnowledge Earth & Space Science. They spent some time collecting notes, and then verbally sharing what they learned with their peers. It is pretty awesome to hear them having conversaion about the Energy Crisis, Ocean Biomes and Saturn's rings! (Did you know every 15 years Saturn's rings are actually barely visible due to lack of reflection of the Sun?! I didnt!)

Another week, another Book Club started! This week our group started Bookstore Burgular. As a group we will read through the book, engaging in discussion, making predictions and in the end writing a review. 

MATH 

This was our week to wrap up subtraction! This continues to be a tough skill for most students. The process involved in regrouping and borrowing multiple times can be confusing to some. Students are encouraged to work through the problem, one place value at a time. 

We had our quiz on Wednesday, and on Thursday I met with students in small groups to go over their work. For the most part, I see a very big difference between everyday work and quiz work. Student skill levels do not always match and I take this into account when marking these. When we work through quizzes in small groups we engage in discussion about the questions, walk through the steps and processes to each question and how to solve the problem. 

You will not see an assignment in PowerSchool for the Quiz - Their mark will be reflected in Subtraction 3 -4 digits. 

SCIENCE

Last week we had our demonstration on how the fulcrum effects the effort needed to lift an object. As a class we discussed the difference in the demonstrations and created visuals for our notes. 

We also discussed Inclined Planes and where we can find them in our world. Students are continuing to take visual notes while they work and are doing an amazing job! 

And of course we needed a real life demo of how the length of an inclined plane changes the effort needed!

Moving a load without a simple machine. 

Now with a steep and short inclined plane. 

And the best of all, longer plane!

Mr. Coffin is always around just in time to show his strength!

He pushed the load with just one tiny finger!

In this experiment, we learned that the longer the inclined plane = the less effort needed. 

Jan 14-18

A Few Reminders: 

• Order your Pink Shirts on Powerschool this weekend! Pink Shirt day is Feb. 27.
• January 21 - 24 - Skating week! Check Calendar for times. Parents are welcome to join. Please email Ms. Potter if you would like to join us! Permission forms are online. 
• January 21 - Girls Floor Hockey tryouts begin (times TBA)
• January 28 - Grade 4's go to Rabbit Hill! Please fill out the permission forms online. 
• January 28 - Raptor Spiritwear store is open online!

ELA

Every week, we continue to work on different writing formats through KidBlog. A big focus for us this year is to pre-plan our writing in order to create stronger written pieces. 

Earlier in the year, we worked to created a web in our planning - working with who, what, where, when and how they felt about their weekend. In place of our weekend update, over the next few Mondays, we will be working on writing personal narratives of a favourite memory. Students will be experimenting with taking the main event and describing the beginning, middle and end. They will also be introduced to different ways to start a narrative to gain the reader's interest, and how to stretch sentences within their narratives to give more details. 

As we plan, we are taking out "what" and planning the main topics in the beginning, middle and end. 

Stay tuned to see the final piece!

We have also begun to work with Simple and Compound sentences. A compound sentence is when two simple statements are connects by a conjunction. We cannot create compound sentences without our FANBOYS! For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet and So! These are the more common conjunctions we use, and will practice, when making compound sentences. 

We have been doing some sentence play in the classroom, creating simple and compound sentences and then identifying different parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronouns, etc) and the subject and predicate (to determine if it is a complete sentence or not). 

Book Club! 

Another Book Club started this week and we're reading Chocolate Fever by Robert Kimmel Smith. 

This week, both clubs worked on describing the main character and setting from their novels. 

Using evidence from the text, they described the character's traits and setting. 

MATH 

We are still plucking away at subtraction! This week we focused in on subtracting across zeros. This is where students have to borrow multiple times, and is often where mistakes are made. We did some practice as a group and I did a quick assessment as well.

We are moving forwards to subtraction of 3 and 4 digit numbers, with regrouping. 

I have also begun to do small focus groups and work through addition and subtraction word problems. 

SCIENCE 

SIMPLE MACHINES! Wheels, Axles, and Levers, OH MY! These simple machines have been our focus this week. As we work through our informational unit, students are working on taking visual notes while they learn! We do have some guidelines while doing this: you can uses words and pictures, only 3 - 4 colours, and you need to have some organized format. I think they're really doing an amazing job with this! 

We also did a demonstration with levers! We wanted to test how the position of the fulcrum affects the amount of effort needed when lifting a load. 

First we placed the fulcrum in the very middle of a first class lever. This was pretty tough to lift! 

Next we tried moving the fulcrum closer to the effort. This was almost impossible! 

Last, we tried moving the fulcrum closer to the load, and VOILA! Willow was able to lift me with just ONE FOOT!

Mr. Coffin even joins in on the fun!

In conclusion, the closer the fulcrum is to the load, the easier it will be to lift! 

SOCIAL 

Our region of study this week was the Rocky Mountains!This is such a beautiful and unique region in Alberta and the students enjoyed researching all about it.