Celebrate!

McKenna reads her lead.

Fourth graders did a tremendous job presenting at Town Meeting this morning.  One area of focus in writing has been to craft leads that will capture the attention of the reader and make that reader want to read on. Many different types of leads have been modeled for the students, including leads that jump right into the action of the story, leaving the reader to wonder from the start what will happen next. Students who shared this morning volunteered to do so, and how wonderful that they have taken such pride in their work that they are comfortable doing so. Special thanks to Lindsey and Samuel for leading the Pledge, Ryan and Sean for leading the school motto, Ari for acting as introducer, and Aliyah, Will R., Jared, Renata, McKenna, Lindsay, Sammy and Kyra for sharing their leads. What a terrific way to begin the week.

I hope that you will all be able to join us next Tuesday for our first "official" author celebration. Students have been working diligently to compose high-quality personal narratives and have each chosen one to share next Tuesday. The students are very excited to share their work with you.

Batteries and bulb in series.

We had a particularly exciting time in science last week. Early in the week student explored series circuits. We discovered that when placing more batteries within our simple circuit, we were able to shine our light bulbs more brightly. Alternatively, when we added another light bulb to the circuit, the light bulbs dimmed. Then we added switches to our circuits--which we learned how to make last week from a few simple materials. These switches, of course, controlled both light bulbs equally; when the switch was on, both bulbs lit, and when off, both were off.

The following question was then posed to students: Is your house filled with series circuits? How do you know? Students were quick to connect their learning: in a series circuit, one switch would control all of their lights, and they clearly knew that in their houses, there are multiple switches that control multiple lights independently. At this time, I drew for them an example of a parallel circuit and asked them to describe how it was different from the series circuit. In a parallel circuit, the light bulbs are connected to parallel wires. (We also used two batteries in series.) Students noticed the difference immediately, of course. I then challenged them to figure out how they could use switches to allow both lights to be controlled independently.

Students eagerly got to work. It was exciting. After many trials, groups across the board could only control one bulb in each of their circuits independently of the other. After drawing on the board what they had all done, and where they had all placed their switches, students were quick to figure out how they needed to edit their circuits to solve the problem at hand. Today, students turned their plans into reality by testing last week's theory. As a result, student were able to create light bulbs in a parallel circuits with switches that controlled their bulbs independently.

Ryan, Sean, Will and Aliyah were the first to create the working, two-switch parallel circuit.

Students are continuing their study of electricity in technology by creating Voice Threads to teach about a topic learned in our unit. As you might predict, students have chosen primarily to teach their audiences how to create either series circuits or parallel circuits with switches. Students, working in partnerships, are responsible for planning their Voice Threads using storyboards, on which they are sketching their images as well as writing their scripts. Then, they will be using digital cameras to take pictures to match their sketches to illustrate each step of their processes. Once photos have been uploaded to iPhoto, students will select their best images, upload them to their Voice Threads, and narrate each slide. Stay tuned for the completed projects to be published in two weeks.

Students are being introduced to new reading logs this week. The new logs will require students to not only keep track of pages, minutes and genres read, but will ask them to record thoughts in writing both before and after they read each time. Expect to see them coming home Monday; I will be modeling effective entries all week.

In addition to expanding our work in our logs, students will be focused this week in writing quality Post-it responses as well as using those Post-its to help guide their partnership conferences.

In math this week we begin our study of decimals. In this unit, students will be building upon their knowledge of place value, learning about tenths, hundredths and thousandths. Students will be comparing and ordering decimals as well as adding and subtracting decimals. Included in this unit is a focus on metric units of length, which of course supports students' understanding of decimals as both systems are based on ten. Students will be likely assessed on the material in unit 4 at the end of the first week in November.

In social studies, we are finishing up our study of Jamestown. Students will be assessed on understanding of content and processes taught on Friday of this week. The study guides students have completed over the course of our study continue to be scaffolded heavily by me. While I will always read the chapters aloud, over time, students will be expected to do more and more of the work independently. At the end of last week I collected students' work and gave suggestions to them on how to improve their question responses. My notes are written directly on their papers. I hope that students will take the initiative and revise their work to meet expectations. On Tuesday we will learn about the importance of the year 1619 in Jamestown, and this will culminate our learning about Jamestown as we move onto other English settlers, the Pilgrims and Puritans.

Jared uses a flip chart to help him recognize correctly spelled words.

Today we had our first spelling assessment. Students were responsible for learning the words with which they were unfamiliar on the pre-test. More importantly, though, students were expected to know and be able to put into words the silent-e generalization that framed our spelling pool:

When a suffix beginning with a consonant is added to a word ending in a silent e, keep the silent e. If the suffix begins with a vowel, drop the silent e.

Clearly, many students had studied their spelling words. However, many failed to learn the generalization. As important as learning the words is knowing the generalization. If one knows the generalization, one is able to apply it to other words in other situations. Then, our spelling becomes a practice in application rather than just in memorization.

I realize that many of you view our blog though an email notification. Unfortunately, you cannot view many features of the blog in this way, such as seeing the pages, accessing the web hyperlinks, and connecting to our photo gallery. I do hope that you will find the time to view the blog by linking directly to it on line on occasion.  Blogs are published every Monday (evening, at the latest), so you will always be able to view it at that time.

Upcoming important events:
October 21: Athletic Center Grand Opening, 1:45 p.m.
October 25: Author Celebration, 8:30 a.m.
October 28: Costume Parade, 8:30 a.m. and Fall Festival, 10:00 a.m. (10:00 a.m. dismissal)
November 7: no school, staff professional development day
November 11: Poetry in the Park